


during

by Kaiseriin



Series: home with you [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, BUCKETS OF ANGST, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Pseudo-Incest, but some happiness, just smother me in angst and fluff, more misery, soft fluffy fluff fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:47:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26339002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaiseriin/pseuds/Kaiseriin
Summary: “I think he understood that you can never be in two places at once, Astrid,” he said hoarsely. “It has to be one or the other. Which world will it be?” ◂ [FivexOC] ▸
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)/Original Female Character(s)
Series: home with you [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1913896
Comments: 18
Kudos: 51





	1. during: one

**Author's Note:**

> im an idiot who thought recovering this story was going to take decades but it turns out FF has a button that literally lets you recover stories immediately so i can just copy over from that. my dunce hat is GLUED DOWN i'm telling you guys!!!

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

_during: one_

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

The embers swept from smouldering rubble washed through me and continued onward along the shattered road, flashing in curled black warnings and dying out in orange sighs. I stepped through flames and felt nothing, phasing through great boulders of fallen buildings and the chunks of stone that slashed makeshift paths through the streets. Mushroom clouds of dust crept toward me, its lumpish outline pushed forward in sluggish rolls until its soot crashed against me and made me wonder if I might be dragged along with it on its endless prowling.

But onward went the mushroom cloud.

In its wake stood the same bluish ring of the portal that had brought me into this world, its hardened bends softening inward until its opening was so small that it was certain to pinch itself shut within a couple of seconds; seconds that ticked in the palm of my hand, seconds that would have allowed me to leap through its gap and find my limp body on the pavement and hear the gentle chastising from my mother for missing embroidery with her and anxious siblings stood around waiting for me and scolding me for rushing off and then there would be ruffled hair and humour doused in relief and –…

And I let those seconds slip from my palm because none of that could happen if Number Five was not stood there beside me when I returned.

I started to run along pavement which split apart and collapsed inward against the tremors from shuddering walls of rubble tumbling inward. I witnessed the death of that portal in my peripheral and witnessed the death, too, in its minute opening, of that other life which had once been ours. In my astral form, metal debris and wires slashed through me and left momentary holes that soon knitted together like little wounds, but I felt none of it apart from the disturbance in the air around me.

In passing splinters of glass, I glimpsed my own reflection; watery blue and vapourish, like smoke that hung in a strange and dense cloud, unnatural, other-worldly.

"Number Five!"

I called for him so much that it hoarsened my throat into a rasp and the sound echoed against the splintered ruins. I moved like the mushroom-cloud, amassing soot and dust and burgeoning fear bubbling up from my chest and filling my mouth in bile, for the world seemed nothing more than the skeletons of old buildings and cinders sparkling weakly in the scorched wind.

Perhaps he had already left this odd, feverish dream and I ran for nothing, toward nothing. Some horrid part of me wondered if he had been crushed beneath the wreckage and was already gone.

"Astrid?"

The name sounded strange and foreign and like it had never been mine at all. He stood atop a mass of dusty stones cobbled together. His blue uniform was powdery and white in patches, his hair was clumped and matted. His face bled through wafting smoke like a pale mirage. He had a shakiness in his legs that made him slip down the stones, his legs would cave beneath him and he would crumble into dust like the buildings.

"You followed me," he said. His tone was frustration and rage swirled together. "Why did you follow me?"

I felt a thorniness prickle and sting behind my eyes from unshed tears. I had never known until then that it was not possible to weep in my astral form.

"Because I wanted you to come back," I answered. "Because I had to make sure that you would come back."

Cold bluish light bled from his fists, whirring like angered wasps before the sound faded and the light died in bleating flares. Wind roared between the ravine of sloped buildings stacked atop one another and the air rustled his uniform, drawing powder from his clothing in flimsy white shimmers.

It was that curl of gentle wind that unravelled, too, the tightly-wound thread of reasoning within me and hysteria frothed in my throat and slithered around that bile in my mouth and spilled out in this weak, alien voice that was somehow mine and not mine.

"I'm supposed to finish my embroidery with Mom," I said. "I made something for Diego. How can I finish it if we get stuck here?"

There was a glassiness to him, not just in his blank stare but in all of him, hard and cold transparency which showed each glinting flash of plain terror. He looked dumbly at his own hands and the blue light that never quite returned.

Then he looked up at me and said, "I made a mistake, Astrid. I made one huge, awful mistake."

Ash touched his cheek and burned his skin, peeled off in the wind to show the small red mark that remained. He seemed deranged, somehow, turning back to the rubble to sift through it even though some metal sheets were still hot and vicious and left welts on his hands. He was searching for something abstract and unnamed. I turned from him and realised that the bare bricks around me had once formed our house.

I waded through a surrealness that made me want to stop him in his endless searching and say, _this is all so silly, you know – isn't it silly, Five?_

Loosened stones cracked behind me and I turned to follow the sound, unsure what had shifted them. It was Five. tossing aside chunks of shattered furniture and the shards of glass that slit his palms. He had thrown a stone that clapped against another and caused a makeshift landslide.

I watched the pebbles dislodge in tidal-waves, thinking that that was what was happening inside of us, too, some profound turning of stones and pebbles, things that had once been stable and certain, now falling and falling.

"Astrid," he called out suddenly. "Stay where you are. Don't go over there."

His hands were trembling and coated in fading blue lines, hands that he held out to me in surrender or more like pleading and warning all wrapped into one muddled motion. He stumbled toward me, tripped on the stones and pebbles that he had thrown around him, unable, it seemed, to look at anything else in this world but me.

But onward went the mushroom-cloud.

I climbed the rising slope of a broken wardrobe and wondered if it had once been mine. I heard him rush to catch me, forgetting that his hand would merely cut through me like smoke. There was a thrumming sound in my eardrums that blocked out his words, though I saw that his mouth was moving and he was reaching for me, even if he understood now that he could not pull me back nor hold me nor turn me away from what lay beyond.

There were patches in the sea of wreckage; arms poked from between stones and boots stuck out from long wooden beams and one powdered face was propped against a pillow of cold debris, turned slightly, so that I saw the slash of a scar stretching from behind the ear to the tip of the cheekbone.

I had memorised that scar, because it belonged to my brother, Diego, who was trapped beneath metal with dried blood crusted to his skin and then I realised that the blank faces behind him were those of my other siblings, grown but somehow still familiar to me.

I had been floating in that dream made of featureless ovals for faces and now suddenly they had taken shape, sharpened with noses and mouths and the eyes – the eyes which stirred some deep and unsettled horror with their unnatural openness, stiff in their sockets, like the glass eyeballs of antique porcelain dolls whose eyes rolled mechanically in their skulls when moved around.

I said, "I think we should find somewhere to sit and wait now."

"Wait for what?"

I had another bubble of hysteria lodge itself in my throat. "Luther taught us how to make forts, remember?"

Orange flushed his face from dying fires and he looked older than he ever had, brows drawn, lips turned into that familiar coil of thinking and thinking and thinking. His hand reached for mine out of habit but fell, dull and useless, to his sides.

Fresh sheets of dust rolled from the high mountains of rubble and speckled him, like a spectre that wandered about the same graveyard in which he had been buried. I thought of colourless faces peeking from between stone and felt an overwhelming rush of sympathy for all that Klaus had gone through in his life.

"I promise you that I will bring us home," Five told me. "Do you believe me, Astrid? Do you trust me?"

"I believe you," I said. "I trust you."

Then we parted; he rushed to find tarp and I ran around to find wooden poles not badly burned or splintered, but I could do nothing more than call for him and point them out. He swept them all into his arms and chose one barren stretch of dirt to build a lopsided fort beneath which we sat facing one another, afraid and unsure of what to do with ourselves.

"I'm more of a burden to you like this," I said. "I can't hold anything. I can't do anything. I can't help you, Five."

Outside of our makeshift shelter, the Earth had grown silent. There was not even a lick of wind to rustle the flaps that folded inward at the entrance. Five settled on his back and I followed suit, our hands on our stomachs, staring at the tip of this odd tent.

"If it had to be anyone," he said, "then I'm glad it was you who followed me."

**▬**

The morning broke from between the rising hills of stone in a sea of glorious white sunlight, its magnified heat blistering the asphalt. I had tried to fall asleep and soon understood that it was another thing made impossible in my astral form, which was what had drawn me out from the fort to sit and watch the sunrise while he slept in the fort, bundled in a scratchy blanket with wonky holes scattered around its charred fabric.

Throughout the night, I had imagined stuffed hyenas and wolves prowling stiffly toward us, having escaped their glass casings.

I told myself that this was temporary and that we would soon latch onto some sudden understanding of our mistake that would turn it all around, that would take us back into the house with our siblings all around us, their arms flung around us while asking questions that overlapped one another and caused little squabbles that Luther would finish in his sternness and he would hold out my little pocket-watch, turning on its chain to show its hands ticking forward, for he had asked Pogo to repair it while I had been gone, and then our mother would herd us to our bedrooms and it would be another unusual day in the Academy finished.

I yearned for her kiss against my forehead and the words that would follow: _goodnight, little astronaut._

**▬**

From within the fort, his calls for me came cracked and hoarse and I heard him scatter what little things we had collected the night beforehand, which was a cluster of spare wooden stakes and tinned cans of pineapple. I phased through the tarp and crouched in front of him. He had sweat on his brow and it was not from the budding heat that followed me inside.

"I'm here," I said.

He brushed down his hair and lay against his blankets. "For a brief second there, I forgot where we were."

I smiled. "Welcome home."

Though his cheeks had lost their pinkish colour and his eyes seemed eternally glossed in a sheen of things unshed, his lips quirked into a grin that was dented on either side by his dimples. I could not feel the smouldering heat of natural sunlight behind me, but warmth flooded my chest and filled me to the brim and finished in a dark blush as if I stood right beneath the sun and _bathed_ in it.

**▬**

The red wagon had a loose wheel that he spent a while turning and turning on its screw until it was steadier, its small clicking sound following us along the paths made hairy and green with tufts of grass blooming in its cracks. In the trunks of crushed, burnt-out cars that were still capable of being opened, we pulled out more tinned cans of food for him and bottles and sunscreen, which he lathered across his reddened skin.

Slumped against a butchered trunk while he rested, he looked sickly and unwell. He had fastened an orange scarf around his head to soak in the beading sweat that flushed his temples. I spotted one lone daisy that sprouted from the ground, yellowed and crusted from goring sunlight.

It was something of a sign to me that there was more than wasteland here, that we would figure this out, that it was nothing more than using what we had learned, what had been knocked into us from birth about survival and brilliance and all the things that we should be.

"I want to show you something," Five said. "Something that I found right after I got here."

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a white marble that I assumed he had taken from our collection. But it turned in his hand and revealed a serial number printed on one half while the other half showed a dull-coloured pupil. He sat it on the shrivelled and yellowed grass which cracked beneath even that light weight, because there had not been any rain around to soften the ground.

"Luther was holding this eyeball," Five explained. "I think somebody caused this apocalypse and when our siblings fought back whoever did this, Luther pulled this from their skull right before he died."

He lifted his shirt to pull out a book tucked into his waistband. I could not hold it myself, so he had to grip it in his sore hands, marred with cuts and blisters. It was not about the astronaut like I had originally thought, but about Vanya, our sister, posed in her uniform on its cover, her paleness framed in a curtain of dark hair.

He turned the book around and I drank in the face that stared morosely back at me above a small blurb. She held herself like she always did, her shoulders shrunk inward, wilting, like she had plucked herself of her own petals so that she might remain unnoticed.

Though she was older, she was still our Vanya.

"She wrote about the family," he added. "She wrote about – about something that happened to Ben."

"What happened to him?" I felt that blooming pain of tears unshed, frustrated that he seemed reluctant to answer. "Five?"

"She never wrote about what happened in great detail," he answered. "Only that he died and it ripped them apart even more than us disappearing."

I felt battered and adrift, always seeing the shoreline in my peripheral but never quite able to latch onto it, never able to haul myself out of this sea which thundered and roared. It had been enough to witness our siblings lain in dust and rubble, but there was something heavier in knowing that Ben died in his youth, without knowing what had happened to us in this butchered future-world.

That was much worse, I thought, much worse than what had happened to us, because we still had each other.

"If we had been there, it would have been different," I said.

"For what part? Saving Ben or saving the goddamn world? Gimme a break, Astrid."

The daisy hardly twitched in the first curling wind that sloped toward us, hauling blackened clouds of dust behind it. I bristled at his sarcasm and fell into a sulk. It was his fault that we sat in this desolate stretch of nothing and he made _jokes_ about it. I focused on the eyeball and tried to roll it like I had rolled the die and marble, but it sat in the dried-out grass, mocking me.

"How much time have you spent in your astral form before this?"

"What does it matter, Five?"

He gazed at wavering lines rippling across the asphalt. "It matters to me. How long?"

"Not more than a few minutes," I answered finally. "Pogo was afraid that anything more than that would be dangerous."

His stare seemed sunken within the purplish stain around his sockets. His head fell against the blackened bark like he had been drained of his strength. "What happened to your pocket-watch? Do you think it might do anything here?"

"Luther broke it." I ignored the flat drop of his shoulders. "Or I broke it, really, when he pushed me, because I fell and crushed it."

Clouds formed overhead in odd splotches of orange and blue muddled together like two tubes of paint had fallen and mixed in swirls and loops. The Earth had been thrown off balance, because its atmosphere choked on dust and rot while its soil soaked in soot and rust.

It was something beautiful to look at all the same, because the fields reminded me of a painting in the house with rows upon rows of crops. It had always seemed lonely and separated from the other paintings around it.

"Pogo had to have a reason."

I tore my eyes from the clouds to look at him. "What?"

"Pogo," he repeated. "He had to have a reason for not wanting your body and mind disconnected for more than a couple of minutes. Your body could hardly survive on its own without your mind to make it function; eat food, drink water. But what if it means something?"

I wished desperately that Diego sat beside me and that I could hold his hand. It was sudden and painful and it punched through my chest harder than any hit that I had ever taken from Luther in training sessions. I wished, with guilt and remorse and the feeling of being a coward chasing right behind, that I had never jumped through the portal because then I could hold Diego and hug Allison and help Klaus through his nightmares.

"I would send you back alone if I could," he said. "I'd stick it out alone if it meant you got back, Astrid."

The eyeball twitched, tipping sideways, then settled again.

**▬**

He would pin down the pages of the book that Vanya had written with pegs for me to read while he boiled water in a pot. I read paragraphs to him, tucked far into a field with our wonky fort stood on its stilt-legs, afraid of the roadside, whose endless stretch of asphalt bothered us more than either of us had been willing to admit to each other.

I continued reading aloud even after he had settled on the blankets thrown alongside the campfire, built from twigs and matches like Diego had shown us. He held his arms beneath his head for comfort, his face cast in flickering shadows from the warm light. He seemed tired, drawn into sleep by the soft lull of my reading to him. His eyelids drooped shut on the final two pages of her second chapter.

I waited for mentions of Montgomery and its museum where we had stolen little plushies and hopped onto the train without tickets in our pockets and talked more than we had in months. I read along the waterfall of her words and felt like the rocky underbelly kept hitting against me between the gushing waves because Montgomery was talked about and finished with gut-punches that dwindled into nothingness.

I kept reading it for him, noting his rising chest and gentle breaths, knowing that he heard none of it and still compelled to tell him.

"Montgomery was something unusual and strange and out of place in a house where normally I was never included in little excursions. Astrid had simply seen me there on that stoop and something in her felt charitable enough to bring me with her," Vanya spoke through me, "and we wandered the grand halls of the museum before we left with stolen plushies stuffed up our shirts, never to talk about it again, never to make plans to do anything like it, never to tell our siblings because perhaps, somewhere inside herself, she questioned why she had brought me in the same way our siblings would probably question her."

Five shuffled around to his other side, blissfully unaware.

"On the ride home, sat together on the train, I tried to tell her about the things that would make me happy, like she had told me about what would make her happy. But she wasn't listening. She put her head on my shoulder and went into her own world. Our mother liked to say that Astrid had one foot in this world and one foot in another."

Shame pricked at the nape of my neck and embarrassment rushed in behind it.

I felt stupid, like I dreamt up some grand adventure that had deflated in front of me. I imagined our siblings reading it and wondered if any of them had thought the same, which only worsened that sense of exposure, of having been cut open and shown as fraudulent and weak and all the things that I had never considered myself to be on the inside.

"On Saturdays," I dared continue, "Allison and Astrid would pool their pocket-money to purchase the latest magazines from the local convenience store. They would bunker down in one of their bedrooms, pouring across the trends of that season, picking apart the newest photoshoot that almost always included Allison as a model. I would sit in the living-room in the hopes that, while passing through the house with arms linked on their way to that shop, my sisters might notice me and pause to ask if I might join them. But it never happened."

Perhaps worst of all was that I could not remember a single moment in which I saw her sitting there in the living-room whenever we left the house, though I knew what she was talking about. I had spent Saturdays with Allison.

I had carefully snipped along the dotted lines of those free posters of herself that unfolded from those magazines, helping her to tape them against her mirror before we would practice make-up with the cheap little sets of gaudy eyeshadow and sticky balms stuck against the glossy covers.

"Number Five must have noticed I was alone. Appearing out of the blue one lonely afternoon, he asked if I might play some pieces for him that I had composed," Vanya added. "He would sit in my bedroom with me and ask about chords and strings and things that were really of no interest to him, but which he asked because he knew that it brought out an underlying pride in me. Astrid would –…"

The words ended, unfinished, because I could not turn the page for myself and he had long since left me in his dreams. I found myself not wanting to turn the page, not wanting to know about this Astrid, this character in her novel whose existence seemed made-up and unlikeable and unlike me.

But it was written in ink and I had to force myself to read it again and again until I understood that that Astrid was me. She always had been me.

**▬**

The night was bleak and lonely and unforgiving.

**▬**

In the morning, the wagon rattled between us and made the only sound that existed in the world. He seemed lost in thought, thinking ahead, planning like he did. I felt like some kind of fraud that had been revealed to the world; one foot in this world, one foot in the old world, like our mother had said, though she had never said it to me. I missed her so much that it felt like a heaviness in my chest, all bundled up and tightening anytime I thought of her.

"Astrid?"

Sunlight caught the harshest angles of his face and still I realised that it was not Five who had spoken. No, his gaze was set on the bubbling asphalt of the road that laboured on for miles ahead of us and he seemed not to notice that my name had been spoken aloud.

Then came this odd thudding sound that split the road, like it shook and rumbled and ran blue with colour. I felt disjointed, confused, looking around for this odd sound, which, the more that I focused and listened, sounded like ticking.

It was like a pocket-watch had been hidden behind the dense clouds and clocked back and forth in its casing, its rhythmic beats tapping out the letters of my name, stringing them together. But still Number Five slogged on with his wagon jerking and jolting behind him, pebbles wedging in its wheels and forcing him to kick at it, which was when he saw that I had slowed down.

"Astrid, are you all right?" Five asked.

In the same moment that he had said Astrid, so too had that bodiless drone behind the clouds, and the two voices blended together as one. I recognised the other one, because that was the same tone that had promised me that he would always protect me and warned me not to break off on missions and swore that there was nothing more in this world that he loved than the finger-painted doodles that I had made for him when we were younger.

"I can hear someone," I said. "I think – I think it might be Diego."

Five dropped the handle of the wagon. "What's he saying?"

"My name," I answered. "He's calling for me."

There was a blue smudge yards ahead of us on the road, its blurry outline narrowing into the familiar shape of Diego, half-crouched in the oddest position like he was stood beside something. I felt something drop inside me, like an anchor that tried to hold me there on that road with Five. But Diego was still speaking and his words were becoming chopped and cut off in the droning tick-tick-tick of some unseen pocket-watch overhead.

"Diego!" I yelled.

I started to run, pushing myself with all the strength that I had, thinking that if I could just show him that I was there, then he might know that I could hear him. I ran, faster and faster, much faster than Five because I could hop across phase through rocks that speckled the ground as if tossed from between the gaps in the clouds by bored cherubim.

There was a sharp crack behind me. Five had tripped and his knee trickled with feeble red lines of blood.

Diego was still on the other side of the road, still calling for me, all the time. Astrid, Astrid, Astrid –…

Five cupped his knee and wiped pebbles from the wound. He struggled to stand without his leg bending against the pain; he fell back against the dirt and stayed there.

I turned around. I left Diego on that road, fading as he was in weaker shades of blue.

I could not touch Five but I dropped in front of him and checked his cuts and bruises, reaching out to him only to realise that my own hand had vanished. There was only the stump, like my hand had fallen off somewhere while I was running; where my hand should have been felt warm and dry and like it was someplace softer than this.

I flexed it and flexed again until it felt like I couldn't flex it anymore, like it was bound in something that tightened and then loosened.

I looked back at Diego and saw that he was gone. My hand was right where it had always been. The ticking sound had ended.

There was nothing left but us.

"Go," Five breathed out desperately. "Keep running! You could make it back – …"

His hands fought to push at me like he battled smoke. His face bled with desperation that came in tears and sweat and a pained grunt which finally deflated him. He dropped against that boiling asphalt and punched at it.

"You should have kept running," Five rasped. "You made this mistake already, coming back for me – you should have left me!"

"Knock it off, Five."

Agony rolled across his features as he sat up fully, but he was so stubborn that he ignored it, glaring spitefully at me. "Knock off _what_ , exactly?"

"Thinking that I would just leave you here."

His jaw clenched and he ground his teeth. "I never asked you to follow me, Astrid. And if Diego had found some way to bring you back to your body, if he had been trying to communicate with you, then I wouldn't ask you to stay, either. _You should have kept running_."

"I'm still here," I said again.

The sunlight had waned from orange to off-white dullness. It would be soon be blackest night and blistering winds and our meagre fort propped against it. Five looked defeated and resentful, his jaw locked like it had been, his ankle swollen and tender. But he looked down at the dirt under his palms and it seemed to deflate him.

I felt drained and the white light around my hand seemed to lessen in its brightness. There was always an odd, shimmering glow around me in the astral form, but somehow that glow had become mute and flickered like a lightbulb on its last legs.

"I feel tired," I said slowly; my mouth had become slack and gooey and like it would drip from my face and pool on the ground if I used it too much. "I'm not supposed to feel anything in my astral form."

"Don't you see that this is what Pogo was afraid of? This was his reason."

I looked down from the clouds. "What?"

"I think he understood that you can never been two places at once, Astrid," he said hoarsely. "It has to be one or the other. Which world will it be?"

**▬**

There was a patch in the tarp for the fort that let in small droplets of rain; it was the first downpour that we had had and the soil turned soft and mushy and bled in muddy streaks onto the roadside, which was the reason we had chosen a wide stretch of old driveway to build the fort. The house that had once stood at its end had been destroyed, its wallpapered walls looming around scorched furniture. I liked to imagine the people that had lived there.

I liked to imagine that they had been sitting around their kitchen, eating smiling strips of bacon laid beneath two yolk eyes, and the flash of light beyond their window had been sudden and quick and their end had been the same.

I sat on the hard ground beside Five and mulled over what had happened on the road. I felt much more like myself – _this_ Astrid, in _this_ time, but I still felt that there was something else that hovered near me, a fuzzing dot that fled whenever I tried to look at it, and that was just like what I had tried to tell my mother about frames and paintings.

I had always had the sense that if I walked far enough, looked hard enough, tried more, I would touch some concrete edge in my world that could be peeled back and then fully torn off to reveal its underlayer.

_Pogo had a reason._

Diego had either found another pocket-watch or mended mine. He had probably held it against my ear and hoped that I might hear it. I dreamt of his face and his eyes dropping to notice the twitch of my hand, perhaps its fingers flexed and inching toward him, sentient and wanting him to know it.

He would have held it and believed that I was really there; that all of me was really there with him, calling out to our family to come and see, before that crushing moment would come when my hand would loosen in his grip and become soft like putty. He would collapse into his chair.

Then he would do it all over again. He would do it until the wheels in the pocket-watch had broken and the hands tapped restlessly against the same hour and its tick-tick-tick stilled. He would find another pocket-watch and start anew. He would sit in that armchair, hunched and hurt and pleading with that pocket-watch squeezed tightly in his palm, like I imagined, wasting his life away, waiting desperately for my hand to scrunch and move like it had before.

_Pogo had a reason._

**▬**

I remembered what Pogo had said, long ago: _there is something to be said for holding a pocket-watch in the palm of your hand and finding yourself in its ticking sound._

**▬**

I left the fort and stood in the inky blackness of the night, which seemed darker than all the nights before it. I dismissed the stuffed hyenas and wolves that hobbled awkwardly through the meadows, paws glued to their stands. I peered into the red wagon but there was nothing in there apart from his spare blankets and tinned cans, lit weakly by the moonlight. I crept toward the ruins of houses and searched through the wreckage for anything that might glint and spark and tick-tick-tick.

I remembered the hours spent with Pogo in his study, perched on his armchair, plucking small wheels and cogs from a leather-pad embedded with dents from his elbows pressing into the cushy material. Aloud, I rattled off the names of the first few parts needed, then imagined them slotting together neatly. I crouched and squinted at the dark spots beneath hunks of metal. Even I could touch nothing myself, I could wake Five and ask him to collect anything that I found.

I felt myself lose more and more of that sudden, gripping motivation with each sweeping raid in abandoned houses because I had not seen even the smallest piece needed – not until I saw something charred and coated in thickened smudges of soot and the light that surrounded me blossomed in excitement, flooding the room.

Rushing back into the fort, I leaned close to Five and yelled in his ear to wake him. He flinched and almost tumbled sideways, looking around the fort, bewildered. He saw me and loosened out his shoulders.

"What happened? Are you okay? Was it Diego again?"

"No. But it will be."

**▬**

With a scowl more suited for an old man than him, Five had shrugged off his blankets and followed me to the house, sifting through its soot to pick up what I had wanted so badly. It was damaged quite badly and he had looked sceptical that there was anything that I could do for it, but he had kept his mouth shut until we returned to our little campsite, dropping beside its fire that he had put out a while ago. He held that delicate object in his hands and placed it carefully in front of me.

"Looks kinda old," he said. "Missing parts, too. You sure about this, Astrid?"

"I got it. Go ahead and sleep, Five," I told him. "I'll wake you when dawn comes."

He hesitated, sitting on the log beneath him longer than he needed, simply watching me. "You're picking worlds," he said. "Aren't you?"

"I'm picking worlds," I said. "And if you don't leave me alone, it sure as Hell won't be this one."

Reflected in the sliver ring around the broken face of the pocket-watch that I had found, he disappeared for a second time, slipping into the fort without another word.

**▬**

The pocket-watch rested on a small scrap of fabric that protected it from the mud underneath. Five had said that the rain here was unnaturally hot and pricked like the needle-points against his skin. There was no comfort in it for him, but the sound of it brought out memories of standing beside a flooded street, watching a wooden matchbox weaving between bobbing scraps of trash toward an old book wrapped in plastic.

Only one hand on the pocket-watch remained; its back had been blown off somewhere in the apocalypse, its wheels torn out, but half of its burnt face was there and that half held the only hand. It had, on that half-side not torn away, the numbers _one – two – three – four –_ and the rest had been lost. The hand had dropped beyond the golden number of four because the cog that held it and would have turned it had been damaged.

I would push the hand forward. I would make it move.

I settled on the ground with the pocket-watch in front of me. I counted the numbers aloud and remembered when Luther had stooped beside a bench to let me clamber onto his shoulders to peer across crowds and see the parade that came through town, remembered stepping into a big tent with Klaus to let a woman paint tiger-stripes onto our faces with pink button noses and long black whiskers to match and I remembered Ben pushing me on a swing that same day.

The hand on the pocket-watch shuddered and ticked forward to four, passed three and strained mid-way, rocking back and forth like something held it there.

I remembered Diego on that road, calling for me.

The hand lurched to number two and stayed there.

**▬**


	2. during: two

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

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_during: two_

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Beneath waning moonlight, I counted and numbered the cogs and wheels that had been found beneath tall mountains of soot, taking quick glances at his silhouette inside the fort, stark and black against the yellow light of his lamp. In this new-world, there were still watches scattered around, though most were useless, having been crushed and shattered beneath crumbling buildings or melted in the roaring wildfires that had ravaged the city and spread into neighbourhoods. Houses stood in fractured ruins, with half-walls still coated in peeling wallpaper and front doors untouched, never wavering even in the heaviest winds.

The dense heat of summertime had shifted into cooler months of fall, crinkling orange leaves clotting those winding roads that were swallowed in dust and then grass. Winter worried him, because the seasons were harsher, the climate riddled with inconsistencies from the soot and rot that had seeped into the soil, the blackened clouds that rose from distant woodlands. Rainfall was strangely hot with an aftermath of acidity in the flat dead air. Hail thundered downward in large clumps that bruised him.

Winter, though, was the worst of it all and fraught with snowfall that rose to his hips and slowed his endless walking and buckled the tarp of the fort and spoiled what little food still dotted the ruins of this world. He sought out socks because his boots were almost always damp and full of slits that let in water and he wrapped his face in scarves to protect his skin against the lashing winds that came colder and colder each morning, his eyes hidden behind goggles.

But he had not let the world turn him cold just yet.

** ▬ **

Dawn was bleached-white clouds and no sunlight to soften it. It washed the horizon in its starched blankness and cleansed the trees of colour. He folded his blankets and tucked them into the wagon. He started the walk that would bring us nowhere different than this place that we were in now, because it seemed always that we walked to places already familiar to us, with the same cluster of rusted metal to the left, the same wonky signpost signalling the town to our right, the same stretch of untouched land to build forts and practice our gifts until nightfall.

Apart from those deep and long hours of night when he slept, we were never apart.

** ▬ **

And while he was gone, I read about the character of Astrid Hargreeves in the book that Vanya had written; accepted that she was me in all ways, detailed in each page, and drank in that embarrassment and shame between paragraphs. Then came the dog-eared chapters that really cut through me and made me think that I had never known myself. But there was Astrid, there was me, contained in font and spacing. She was blunt and hideous and still I read it from one chapter to another and then again, cracking its already worn spine.

_Pogo had a soft spot for Astrid and perhaps that was what sparked the private lessons which had an almost conspiratorial nature to them. Klaus had tried pressing his ear against the door of the study in which Pogo worked with Astrid, until he became bored and drifted off. Allison remarked that if anything, private lessons meant Astrid had probably not mastered her abilities as perfectly as the rest of them had and Luther added that she trained with him in the garden, too, because she relied on her powers so much that her hand-to-hand combat without them was much weaker than our father would have liked._

_It was our father who had told Luther to suggest these one-on-one lessons in the garden on the pretence of wanting to improve together and Luther, ever the obliging son, did exactly that._

_It was Diego who said that her gift had a lot of downsides to it that none of the others could understand but it was our mother had said that line first, which was why Diego was repeating it so fervently – Astrid and her many worlds, he said, just like mother had said. But what he really meant was that Astrid had her world and it mattered very little if the rest of lived in it until she decided that she wanted us to live in it._

The others had been openly mocking of those lessons but I had not known all the other stuff thrown on top of it. Allison had never said those things to me and Klaus had never alluded to listening into conversations with Pogo. Dad had told me that I was weaker in hand-to-hand combat but the lessons with Luther had been something special to me and I had never suspected that Dad had made him practice with me.

So, there it was again: mortification, wounded pride, _remorse_.

** ▬ **

I started to think about it more and more until it ate away at me during those long-winded, mindless walks that took us nowhere new and showed us nothing special. I sifted through memories of messing around with my siblings when we would sit for languid afternoons in the garden after missions with golden sunlight and playful wars about who had _really_ caught those bad-guys and shrugging off little jabs about Five and I sitting so close together and Five then asking if that meant Luther and Allison should shift apart, too.

Vanya was not in those gold-toned recollections. I could not say _where_ she was in relation to the rest of us, either. In the house, perhaps, in her room which overlooked the narrow slip of garden in which she might have seen us, her violin held limply in one hand, her budding resentment held in the other. She summarised it well.

_It never occurred to anybody to ask me if I might want to join because I occurred to nobody._

** ▬ **

Hardened earth wore down the soles of Five's shoes until he had to find another pair of tattered boots to pull on instead. His eyes squinted permanently, his mouth was always coiled, held in. He had sweat on his brow despite the snow dripping from the opaque blanket of nothingness overhead, so white and void that neither the heavens nor the ground could be separated from one another.

The wheels of his red wagon were rusted and scraped against the ground, cutting into the snowfall and leaving behind a winding line like that of a snail.

"You're thinking about the book," he said. "Right?"

I smiled to myself, perhaps a little more bitterly than I really meant, because he hardly needed to ask. Five could always tell things about me. I peered around and saw the shrivelled, charred hands of trees poking from the snow and the roofs of cars half-buried in rubble a few yards ahead.

"Yeah. I'm thinking about it, all right."

He tilted his head back to drink in the clouds. "Look, Astrid, what Vanya said about you…I know she said some lousy stuff. But I know she cared about you, too."

There was a narrow strip of metal that sprouted from the whiteness far behind us, two signs dangling from its tip, bumping against one another so that a constant windchime chased behind us, slipped between us and fled into the scorched remains of the woods nearby.

"She was right to say what she did about me," I said. "It just feels funny. Like I misremembered my own memories and painted them differently than she did. Maybe I wanted to make myself look better or feel better, I don't know."

He was quiet for such a long time that I thought he had dropped it altogether, but his lips unfurled from that tight knot that was a sign of deep thinking and loosened enough to let out a long-winded sigh.

"If I were to write a book, I would describe things a little differently," he started.

His cheeks were almost always stained in a pinkish-red colour from the blistering cold that ripped against his skin in brutal lashings and his jaw was peppered in a light stubble. He scratched at it as if he sensed that I thought about it, that sign of his changing and growing up already. He seemed greatly uncomfortable and his tone reflected that weird uncertainty that was nothing like his usual cockiness.

"If I were to write about you alone, Astrid," he said, clearing his throat, "I would say that you're the most tolerable person in that house."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "Tolerable?"

"Tolerable," he repeated. "And maybe the only solace that I could have in a messed-up world like ours; this one and the last."

The snow coated his hair which had grown long enough to brush his brows, furrowed again in that familiar manner that I liked most about him, always thinking and staying ahead like he did. He was haughty and stubborn and all the things that made our siblings call him names like _asshole_ and _know-it-all_ and _moron-asshole-supreme-jerk-loser_ , which Klaus had invented in the midst of another childish argument and the more that I thought about it, the more that I understood that I could be just as _asshole_ and _know-it-all_ and _moron-asshole-supreme-jerk-loser_ as him.

If there had ever been any doubt about it, then Vanya had dispelled it in her little tell-all. She had sure told on me.

"Five," I said tentatively, smiling at him, "you should know that there isn't anybody else that I care about more in the world than you; this one and the last."

"That was already pretty obvious when you damned yourself by jumping through a portal to follow me." His eyes met mine and I saw that he was grinning. "But it doesn't hurt to hear it all the same. If only Diego heard that, he would lose his damn mind. He always said he was your favourite."

"There are no _favourites_ ," I grumbled. "Just – if I had to be stuck in a desolate hellhole with anybody, my first choice would have been you."

"Who was your second choice?"

I paused. "Well, then it would be Diego, obviously."

Five blew a raspberry. "That caveman? Please."

"And who was _yours_?"

He scrunched his lips in a pout and pretended to mull it over for a few seconds. "Nobody. Luther would act as much of a caveman as Diego and think he had discovered fire for the first time in human history and Klaus would huff whatever glue or drug that wasn't totally wiped out in the blast. Allison would complain the whole time. Vanya…She would probably come the closest, I suppose. But I figure she has enough on her plate, don't you think?"

"So, you're saying that it was always me?"

He rolled his eyes. "Can we quit the mushy stuff now? I am obliged to say one nice thing per year to balance out all the meanness in me or I'll shrivel up and die."

I laughed and felt a lightness that made it seem like we floated along that endless stretch of black road until the sound of that whining red wagon forced my feet back to Earth. I felt the warmth that always came from being around him and wanted it to hold on just that little bit longer but it slipped out and rushed off with the rest of the snowflakes that drifted around us.

"I miss them," I said. "All of them. Cavemen and all."

Five breathed out a billowing cloud of white that flew against his skin. "Yeah. Me too."

** ▬ **

The prosthetic eyeball sat atop a pile of books stacked in the wagon, staring blankly between us. Its brown colour had not faded despite all the times Five had tossed it around and stuffed it in his pocket and wrapped it in cloth to clean it. It blinked and glared and watched, for it had seen the destruction of the planet and seemed sure that we would die before it did. It sat still, sullen and moody in its dull colour, though it followed Five as he bent in front of it and ensured that it would remain in place and not tip on its own accord.

Reassured, Five said, "You can do this, Astrid."

I focused on that brown-coloured pupil and felt a faint spot of itchy power bloom in the palms of my hands. I remembered Luther tying my laces with what he called the bunny-method, with two flopping loops for its ears and a little pat on its knotted button-nose once he had finished. I breathed the scent of brownies made by my mother and remembered Klaus licking the spoon coated in melted chocolate and Mom scolding him without really meaning it. I held hands with Ben on his bed and we talked aloud about our futures.

The eyeball shuddered and shifted along the lumps on the cover of the book, bumping against them like the silver ball in a pinball machine, dropped between the bumpers.

Five held out his hand, flat and coated in a thin layer of dirt. "Attagirl," he breathed out slowly. "Now lift it and drop it in my hand."

In those afternoons of gardening with Ben and Allison, there had been an odd comfort in the dirt that dried on our hands and there was even more pleasure in scrubbing our skin with soap to watch those hardened clumps wash away in the thundering gush of the faucet while our mother stood behind us with hand-towels in her arms. Klaus liked to stick his hands in mud and sift around until he found worms, flopping pink in his lap, blindly rolling around in the hopes that they might land back in their wet-soil homes.

The eyeball jumped and settled; jumped and settled.

"Keep trying," he murmured.

Allison never liked dirt on her hands and stole gloves from the kitchen and Ben had made fun of her for it, though it was light-hearted and finished with a round of throwing seeds at one another. I remembered then, while the eyeball spun and whirled and lifted and fell in flashes of brown-coloured dullness marred with a serial number on its other side, that Diego had fought with Luther and both of them had knocked our pots filled with freshly-planted tulips. I remembered the dirt catching between the tiles that led to our little greenhouse. I remembered their apologies.

The eyeball rose and plopped into his hand.

Five leapt from his spot with a shout of triumph and kicked the silver bucket beside him, arms thrown up, head tilted back against the snow. I felt exhaustion knock me sideways but stood and walked through the wagon, phasing like smoke again. He flopped onto a log and tossed the eyeball from hand to hand, holding it in front of his own eye, then throwing it around again.

"You did good," he said.

"Pogo would agree with you," I said. "But Dad would not."

"What the Hell did Dad know anyway?" He shoved the eyeball in his pocket. "Acorns, that's what he knew about. God, I bet he would _love_ this if he knew where we were – us being _stuck_ here. He would laugh and tell me that he warned me, if he could. He would say that everything happening here is what I deserved."

I smiled ruefully at him. "And me? What did I deserve?"

"Better than this," he answered, without a smile, without humour. "Better than the Academy and the lousy stuff Dad put us through. Hell, we all deserved better than that. And what did it even matter anyway? Doomsday happened. His great Academy failed him after all."

"Because we weren't there," I said.

"You know, you keep saying that. But do you really think we would make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? Whatever wiped out the world is a lot more powerful than us, Astrid."

"I would rather be taken down with the rest of them," I said. "Because Ben once said that it would be hard to wake up in world without all of us in it. We're in that world, Five."

Snow dropped from his boots in clotted-up balls of white as he stood. "But we're not staying in it." he said.

** ▬ **

_The room held the scent of fresh cotton which came from the sheets that our mother changed religiously in the evenings. She closed the bedroom door and told us not to disturb her while she cleaned, because that room had become sacred somehow, without us ever realising it, without ever being told. But we had learned that there was no sound in there apart from the gentle symphony of machines and wires and artificial breaths inhaled and exhaled in a rhythmic pattern. Mom was in that room more than anybody, especially in the darkest days, though Diego was a close second. Others, like Luther, stayed on the opposite side of the house wherever possible._

_He was afraid to see Astrid in that room of fresh cotton, in that bed._

_Dad had been in there only three times that I knew for certain; the first being the day of the accident or the incident or whatever other word the family used to dance around it, the second being an unusual time in which I had stumbled across him in the armchair tucked into the corner of its large space, and the last on the day that I left the home myself. I would question if he felt some kind of obligation to sit there and bear witness to what was essentially the latest tragedy in a family made of many more._

_On that last day with suitcases packed in the hall, when I found him in the room, I asked if he was waiting for some kind of miracle that would allow Astrid to wake up. He looked at me blankly and replied, "Miracles? Miracles do not occur, Number Seven. And if they did, she is certainly not deserving of one."_

** ▬ **

The hatch was slanted and wooden and hidden behind bricks that had fallen from the chimney of the house, coated in chalk and powder that lifted in clouds when he sifted around. It dropped into a basement, inky-black and full of menacing shadows. It was like furniture had been thrown into a big blender and spun too many times, with wooden beams slashing through unmoving sheets of fabric. The ground looked slick and wet and its wooden innards groaned and ached against the influx of damp wind which followed when Five lifted the hatch.

"You sure you don't want me to go down there with you?" I asked him.

"Nah. I'll be faster on my own and then we can mosey on outta here."

" _Mosey_?" I repeated. "When did you become a cowboy?"

"I am so sorry if your vocabulary is so limited that the word ' _mosey_ ' shocks you so much, Astrid."

His face screwed up at the sound of my laughter, his heavy brows drawing together. He looked unsure of himself, like he was dithering between scolding me or asking what was funny about what he had just said, until his own lips betrayed him and he started to smile.

"I'm being serious here, you know."

"I know you are," I said. I had an awful snort that came in great fits of laughter and I tried to hide it behind my fist because I hated it. Dad called it piggish and unseemly, which made me embarrassed, especially in front of Five. "That's what's so funny. _Mosey on outta this place_. Are we stopping at the old timey saloon while we're it?"

"Screw this, I'm going down there."

"Watch your spurs, boy howdy," I called down after him. "Darn rootin'-tootin' cowboy!"

His outline blended into the shadows in that basement and I lost sight of him. "Remind me how old you are again?" he shouted back to me.

"Why, that ain't no question for a respectable lady such as myself!"

"A-huh, same age as me and yet _such_ a difference in maturity."

I waited with the red wagon while he clambered down the gapped staircase, hopping the steps that weakened beneath his step and bent inward like it might drop him into its inky-black depths. He disappeared into its shadow and I heard him move around the soggy cardboard boxes from the snow that had melted through the gaps in the hatch.

I wondered if the spirts that followed Klaus around ever worried about him like I worried about Five. I sure felt like a ghost most times. I felt like smoke. There was no way to tell him how that was, only that I felt it.

"I struck gold," he yelled to me.

He hauled himself through the hatch, sinking his hands into the snow and dirt to claw himself out, as if he crawled from his own grave. It unsettled me so much that I felt relieved once he collapsed onto the crunching snow, rolling onto his back to show the lumpy bag strapped around his chest.

Standing with a grunt, he tipped the bag and let its contents drop into the tarp that lined the wagon and I was more than surprised to see that he had gathered flasks, bottles, tinned food, a radio and a tape-recorder along with some pencils and paper, the latter of which seemed ruined around the edges, but still useable.

Then he fished in his pocket and clasped something that he waited to pull out, teasing me with his dimpled smirk.

"What is it?"

"Exactly what you were looking for," he answered.

From his pocket, he yanked out a watch on a chain that dangled and swung in his grip and my heart seemed to stutter in my chest because it was practically untouched, unlike all the other watches that we had found. He stuffed it back into his pocket and kept grinning.

"Don't say I never did nothing for ya."

I snorted at him and watched him scoot around the wagon to look at his newfound treasures. "Thank you, Five," I said. "Though you know that radio will give you nothing but white noise, right?"

"I know," he said. "But I think the tape-recorder might work. I also found _this_ little baby right here…"

He pulled a bottle that had been tucked into his coat. It was vodka, transparent and dangerous as it swished behind a tattered label peeling in strips. He grinned like an idiot and loosened its cap but had yet to take a sip.

"Do you really think you can handle that, Five? I mean, you're a light-weight. You were tipsy from Klaus' flask that time in –…"

He scoffed and swallowed one fast, burning gulp that made him choke and still smile like he had told a joke and he was waiting for me to laugh. "Are you gonna _tell_ on me? Huh? Come on, Astrid. I can handle it just _fine_."

Sloping off toward the front of the red wagon, he kept the bottle in one hand and lifted the handle with his other. He jerked it forward and returned to his walking, occasionally holding the bottle against his lips, chugging it and then continuing. I looked back down at that hatch, its black emptiness swelling upward to frighten me. He waited for me up ahead.

"I can handle it," he said again, glancing back at me.

He left his scarf loose around his neck and the wind tore the flesh of his cheeks to ribbons.

** ▬ **

The bottle was half-empty and he was half-full. He walked like a drunk, drifting sideways, not quite falling or bumping into anything. He had enough of a hold on himself that he kept a marginally straight line even in the dense snowfall that hid the asphalt and dragged against his boots like his ankles had been wrapped in thick chains. I watched him warily and wished that I had taken the eyeball from him, because if he did tumble, it would be crushed in his pocket like Luther had crushed my pocket-watch.

Five had been drunk before.

Luther had caught him and Klaus sipping on something that carried the whiff of battery-acid but Klaus said that it was something he had brewed himself and therefore top-notch quality that he would shill on the market – _if anyone should be allowed a drink, Luther_ , he had said, _it should be the children of Reginald Hargreeves_.

I had watched Luther grip both of them by their collars and rip them from the closet, dragging them through the hall to toss them beneath the showerhead in one of the bathrooms, turning on cold water that soaked them almost instantly. Klaus had yelped that he had perfectly good pills in his pocket that Luther had just ruined which was the stupidest thing he could have said because Luther only turned the showerhead on him even more. Luther had been so mad that he sent them both into the rooms with sopping wet uniforms and Mom looked between them and said, _oh, you boys_ and then she rushed to make them hot chocolates.

Luther had called them lucky because our father had not been home that night. I called them opportunists for that exact reason.

Mom had also brought them fresh pyjamas and Luther had stood in front of their doors to ensure that both changed and fell into their beds, but soon he asked if I would help Five because he kept climbing out of it to harass Luther and spit names at him like _big-jerk-dickhead-asshole-supreme_. Klaus had tried to sneak out from his room through his window but his pyjamas caught on the wood and kept him snagged there until Luther found him.

Five had cheeks aglow in pink stickiness from the alcohol and his breath was like those sour sugar-coated jelly-worms that Diego used to love when he was a little kid until Dad had told him that all his teeth would plop out and he would wander the Earth with dark-pitted gums and never again had Diego touched those sugary bags in candy stores.

I had pleaded with Five to remain in his bed but he was humming and waving his hands around like he led some imagined symphony. Then he had rolled from his bed and banged his head against his bedside table.

"Do you know you're pretty?" he had asked me, still lain flat on his floorboards.

"Do you know you just gave yourself a concussion?"

"I would know if I had a concussion," he had slurred. "I had one after that mission – where was it again?"

Bending down, I had scooped him up and pushed him onto his blankets again. Luther had it much worse – Klaus had accidentally knocked some bottles that Luther first thought were plain water but the liquid was eating into the wooden floorboards with bubbling green foam left behind. Klaus had all sorts of strange chemicals and experiments in his bedroom, like the clump of rotting fruit that he let fester beneath his bed to watch the changing colours.

When Mom had asked what the stench in his bedroom was, he had replied that he was suffering anosmia and he had been unaware of any odours whatsoever.

"The jewellery store downtown," I had told him. "Teleported right into that guy swinging his gun around."

"Are you staying here?"

He had been poised sideways on the bed with his legs dangling from the side, his head lolled back to look up at me. He had been staring right at me with a focus that was soon lost, his eyes floating somewhere behind me, bloodshot and tender.

"No, Five. I'm staying in my own room. Luther will check on you."

"Screw him," he had said. "Spoilsport. _Big-jerk-dickhead_ -…"

Finally, he had flopped into place and angled himself enough to let me pull the blankets around him, though I paused to check he was not really concussed and while my hand smoothed down his hair, he had leaned forward so suddenly that I was sure he would kiss me or pull me closer because his foggy eyes followed the movement of my lips when I tried to ask what he was doing and there was a moment in which he seemed unable to answer that himself and his nose bumped gently against mine and he said _boop_ – …

Then he had collapsed against his pillows and it had never been discussed again because he had awoken in the morning awash in bleary contempt and biting meanness that worsened ten-fold when Klaus came downstairs, cheerful and loud and already chomping on bacon that stuck from between his lips like a mocking shrivelled-up tongue directed right at Five.

** ▬ **

Five had been drunk before and he was drunk again, all right. He sat on an upturned metal box and hummed to himself like he had that night which had been long since forgotten in his mind and which had floated unnoticed in mine until now. There was pain and humour in remembering because I longed for Luther to summon me and tell me what should be done and for Klaus to wander around like he did with his arms aloft and bobbing and his green eyes alight in playfulness.

I watched Five tip the bottle and shake it for the last drop to hit his lips and then he threw it at the closest slab of concrete against which it cracked and shattered in a flash of silver. I watched him while I pulled apart that pocket-watch he had found using astral energy like the eyeball, but it was slow and tedious for me because it took so much out of me to do it in this form.

I was even more distracted by Five, who wobbled off the metal box and tottered toward the red wagon to sift around its books and bottles.

"Are you all right, Five?"

He glanced back at me. "Fine. I was thinking that you might be gone tomorrow. You might make it back after all, with that watch."

The wheel that I had been turning in front of me fell and dropped against the ground with a dull thud. I was unsure of his tone. "Does that frighten you?"

"You getting back there is not what frightens me," he answered flatly. "You getting back there and having _complications_ frightens me."

"What kind of complications?"

"Complications like being stuck somewhere between here and there."

He latched onto the clunky black tape-recorder in the red wagon and tore it out which caused an avalanche of other books and pots to tumble against the metal bottom of the cart. The tape-recorder had a glass panel that was fogged-up but still showed the reels inside and the lower-half was lined in dots that let out sound. He pressed down on one button and the tape hidden behind that clouded white glass spun weakly.

A staticky song echoed out: _let me play among the stars, let me see, oh, i wanna see what spring is like…_

"We gotta try, Five," I told him. "Otherwise what else do we do here?"

"I don't know," he replied. "But I don't want to do it alone."

His words seemed solid and tangible and hit me hard. "You won't be alone," I said. "Because I'm not gonna stay there. I'm gonna come back."

"How?"

Beside his boot, one of the confused cockroaches spun and danced its radiated choreography with its limbs bent and straining to push itself around. He simmered in a mood that reflected the blank greyness of his surroundings, defined only by the narrow black poles which protruded from the dirt like spears launched in a javelin throw.

"I told you before that I wouldn't miss that house if I left it," he continued. "I told you that I wouldn't miss any of it, but that I would wish I did. Well, I don't wish anymore. _I do_."

"I'll make it back, Five."

"You don't know that." His lips narrowed into at tight, colourless line and he looked like he was holding back something more. "But I want to believe it."

He crossed the wide expanse between us and dropped to the ground in front of me, still clutching onto that tape-recorder. He looked into its reels like they told him something. He held it out to me and I tried to hear what they had told him, too.

"It can still record sound," he said. "Whole world goes to shit and this little thing can _still_ record sound."

"I won't go," I said. "I'll keep the pieces of the watch but I won't put them together –…"

"You can't do that," he said, talking over me, _cutting_ into me because it hurt so badly to hear what followed, "because you have one chance that might work and might not but if you don't take it, you'll hate me. I know you will."

"I would never hate you."

"Sure you would," he replied calmly. "Because I brought you to this place and I'd be keeping you in it for my own selfish reasons. But if you go tomorrow, I just – I wanna ask you a favour. Speak into this tape-recorder for me."

I had those tears searing behind my eyes. "Why?"

"Because I want you to."

"You'll record over that song and lose it forever if I speak."

"I don't care," he replied. "There isn't anything I'd rather hear than something from you because the day'll come when maybe I can't remember what you sound like and the only thing I'll have is this tape."

"I keep telling you –…"

"That'll you come back," he filled in. "I know. So what harm is there in doing this for me anyway?"

The drunken film in his eyes had faded and he sat cross-legged with the tape-recorder between us, its buttons labelled with a childish scrawl that showed REWIND – PLAY – FORWARD – RECORD. I noticed that he had a tremble in his hands and he was looking around the world like it was closing in on him, becoming much smaller when before it had seemed endless and wide.

"What do you want me to say?"

His shoulders rose and fell. "I don't know," he breathed out. "Maybe what you said earlier. On the road – what was it again?" – here his cheeks dimpled from a sly grin – … "Cared more about me than anybody else?"

I laughed and rolled my eyes. "You just want me to get in trouble with Diego if he ever hears it."

"If he ever hears it," Five repeated.

The smiles we both wore drained and swirled down into the core of the Earth, sizzled up in hellfire. I wanted to tell him more than what that tape could hold. He held a fingertip against that RECORD button and I nodded; he pressed it and the reels inside whirred and spun madly but were silenced by a stuttered beep.

"I don't remember word for word how I put it," I said, talking to him and that little black box as one, "but I said I cared about you more than anybody in this world and any other – and whatever one comes out of testing this pocket-watch, too."

There was a dulled red dot that bloomed and died in bleating gasps beside the record button and I focused on that rather than him because I had never been so blunt with him before.

"You won't need this tape forever," I told him. "Because I always come back, remember?"

He fiddled with the button and it made a harsh jutting sound that turned the reels faster and faster. His face turned pale and he clapped his hand against the black box, which softened the roll of the reels. Confused, he held his ear against it, shaking it.

"Goddamn it," he muttered. "Is it working?"

I burst into that great snorting laughter that made me clap a hand against my mouth to smother it because of what Dad had told me. I felt so embarrassed that Five was hearing it loud and clear. He turned the tape-recorder around in his hands. Sound warbled through its speakers and the reels spun, whirled, stilled again, spun, whirled, stilled again.

"We have to do it over again," I said. "Delete it, Five. Let me try again."

"What for?"

"It might have caught me laughing."

"And so what if it did?" he replied easily, leaning back. "I like the sound of your laugh. I'm not deleting it. I got one thing in this world and that's this tape, so it's not going anywhere."

Though it seemed odd to think it, he looked boyish and young but we shared the same age and yet somehow I had found myself imagining him as older in the same way that I had always considered Luther to be older than the rest of us when there was no gap or difference between us at all. Five loosened his shoulders and his dimples were flush and heavy.

"Tomorrow," he said.

I smiled. "Tomorrow."

** ▬ **

The alcohol had brought him the greatest night of sleep that he had ever known. He rested flat on his back, blankets around him, that tape-recorder tucked right beside him for good measure. I was plucking the pieces of the watch that he found in the basement apart with astral energy and putting them alongside the older pocket-watch that was already half-formed and waiting for them. It took so much effort from me that I took little breaks between each movement and watched him from afar.

The sky glittered sickly-green and blue that night. I contemplated smashing the pieces and forgetting about attempting to reconnect with my body; the more that I thought about it, the more that it sounded infeasible because my body was in the past and hooked to machines from what Vanya had written and I was just as afraid as he was that I might get stuck in some limbo existence.

_our mother liked to say that astrid had one foot in this world and one foot in another_

I was choosing worlds just like I had told him. But I wanted the one that had him in it.

** ▬ **

Poking from the rubble of a department store nearby, its roof caved inward and sputtering plaster-dust that blended into the snow, sat this little mannequin. I pulled her out only to realise that her lower half was missing. There were other hands in the rubble that were not so hard and plastic but rather bloated red and rubbery.

She floated in a bubble of astral energy. She was the heaviest thing that I had lifted so far in my astral form, but to anybody else, she weighed nothing at all.

I dropped her close to the edges of his camp but could not bring her any further because I had expended too much of myself, withering down to the ground and resting there until frosty sunlight flooded between the distant hills and roused me. I heard him call for me and I called right back. The relief in his eyes when he turned a sharp corner of fallen bricks and saw me was palpable. I felt nothing but guilt for it.

"Who is that?" he asked.

"She'll stay with you while I'm gone," I told him. "What'll we name her?"

"I'm not talking to a damn mannequin, Astrid."

"I brought her all this way," I said. "I would feel better knowing that you had somebody with you, Five."

There was a flat silence that was soon filled in by the pelting lash of snowflakes blown at him in the wind. "Delores," he said finally.

** ▬ **

The pocket-watch sat on the red wagon and its hands shifted forward in cool, soft ticks that mimicked his tapping against the red metal cart. His bloodshot eyes darted between me and the watch, his left leg bouncing in place. I watched the snowflakes latch onto his collar and soak his throat because he had taken off his scarf. He left it in the fort to let himself be bare and open for once.

"I'll wait here," he said. "I won't go anywhere."

There was nothing identifiable about this place apart from the fort billowing behind him and the cluster of solitary trees with a broken cart stood between them. The cart had lost a wheel and rested, lop-sided, to rust.

"I'll be coming back, Five."

The ticking of the watch against my eardrum was comforting and familiar to me.

I remembered the first sip of tea brewed in that floral teapot that Pogo kept in his study and the crunching bite of the biscuits that he offered even if we were not supposed to eat sweet things before dinnertime; _our little secret, Astrid_. I remembered the time that I had crept into the kitchen with Ben to gorge ourselves on candy tucked far into the depths of the cupboard and then brought him upstairs to puke after he had eaten too much and we had lied to our mother and said that he had just suffered a funny turn while she placed damp cloths on his forehead and studied a thermometer, her beautiful face puzzled and worried when it came back normal.

I heard Five call out, "Astrid?"

** ▬ **

The world titled sharply on its axis and the ticking ended.

** ▬ **

On the other side, Mom said, "Hello, little astronaut."

**▬**


	3. during: three

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

_during: three_

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Colourful lights were strung overhead in a wobbling line that blurred my eyes and forced them down to my shoes, polished and tied with the bunny-loop that Luther had taught me. I felt a stickiness on my palm and looked to find a tub of mint ice-cream in my hand, sprinkled with chocolate and topped with a translucent pink spoon.

It tasted like ash and soot in my mouth and I opened my lips to let out that smoke, though nothing followed and I thought myself filled with hot-air, deflating quickly. Beside me stood a familiar shape that blurred and smudged against the flashing lights all around, acid and neon and sinking into the creases of my brain to wash out all understanding of my surroundings.

I had heard my mother but she was nowhere to be found.

Tears sprung at the corners of my eyes like I stood in a wind-tunnel and soon the wetness dampened my cheeks because I realised that it was _Ben_ beside me, holding a tub of chocolate ice-cream in one hand, the other hand dropping quarters onto the countertop.

It was my Ben, who I had lost once after leaving our childhood home to find Five and whom I had lost _again_ soon after that when we read the book that Vanya had written and saw what had happened to him.

In the jars of candy that lined the shelf beside us, I saw my reflection. I was pale and blonde and much younger than I had been in that butchered half-world with Five and I wept even more because I had slipped into an older self and I still could not speak or shift my limbs or do more than stand like I had been made mute. I watched the world through two peepholes like a sparrow within its birdhouse, peering out at the forest.

"Do you want another scoop? I think I have some quarters left," Ben said.

Blue-toned shadows shifted around his gentle features, lining the concern that filled his eyes when he saw those tears staining my cheeks in thick lines. I wanted to tell him that it was all right; that it was the simple pain of missing him and mourning him and finding him here again with pastel sprinkles stuck to his baby-fat cheeks. He had never looked so young before, so much like a child. And we had been children, hadn't we? Weren't we _still_ children?

There was mint ice-cream on my lips that sealed them together, though, and no words came out to explain the sudden tears shed in front of him.

"Are you all right, Astrid?" Ben asked worriedly.

I felt that hot-air suck itself back into my chest and my eardrums thundered with sound from the echoing screams of those strapped to rollercoasters, blending into the twirling neon shrieks of the arcade that hovered behind him. I realised that we were stood in front of an ice-cream parlour on a pier and that we had snuck out of the house with our siblings, but I could not remember the year or month exactly.

"You don't have to be embarrassed," he said. "Not everyone likes those rides anyway."

Then it struck me, another half-memory filtered through the peephole in the birdhouse, that I had been too afraid to join the others on one of those swooping rollercoasters that was the tallest and fastest in the whole park, plastered all over its posters with cartoonish figures holding hands above heads and mouths painted as wide pits in pinkish faces.

I hated heights and always had but Ben had been the one to tell me that we could do something else instead.

"I'm sorry you're missing out because of me," I said hoarsely.

It was not me talking but the other Astrid who had stood on the pier and eaten mouthfuls of mint ice-cream with the sense that she was in two worlds at once. I remembered that feeling of being pulled two ways, of feeling torn and seeing frames around my painting, aware of something different scratching at my retinas but I had shaken it off and focused on the wafting scent of cotton-candy sweetening the air.

Ben smiled and snatched napkins from the countertop to dab at my cheeks. "Klaus told me that he wants to ride that thing _at least_ eight times tonight and I can join him then," he replied. "I'm not missing out on anything. So why are you still crying?"

Gentle laps of wind bristled his collar. He pulled his scarf around himself more tightly while I tossed the napkins. Together we left the dreamlike nature of the parlour to stroll along the pier. Crowds passed, ducking beneath the stilt-legs of clowns whose ghoulish forms seemed stark and unnatural against the flashing lights. I was wrapped up in heady warmth of candied-apples sold on nearby stalls, wrapped up in the lap of the sea.

I wondered if I existed in purgatory with him, wandering around, because it seemed we went in circles aimlessly and I strained to recall what had happened this night.

"Do you want to try out the tea-cup ride?"

He pointed at the large spinning cups ahead, filled with families holding hands and sodas and I felt another flood of shame that it was mostly children sat on the laps of their fathers. I wanted to tell him that I could handle the big rollercoasters with swooping heights but I imagined sitting in a cart that shuddered upward toward a bend and teetered for one horrid second before it dipped and all around me would be loops and turns and the ground would be lost to me.

"Yeah," I said. "I think I can handle the tea-cup ride."

Ben smiled and we put our last quarters together for the tickets. Children rushed out from the tea-cups, tugging their parents with them. We climbed into the red cup closest to us, sitting together and shutting its little door.

Soon, the tinkling tune started and the cups danced in winding circles. I felt myself fill the gaps that existed between me and this foreign body. I stepped through the peephole and controlled my mouth, though it felt alien and mildly painful like I had just had my wisdom teeth pulled and my tongue poked incessantly at the craters in my gums.

"Ben," I started, "you need to listen to me, _please_ –…"

Ben was smiling benignly but his skin had begun to drip like liquid from his face and it puddled around his shoes; those, too, melted outward into the cool metal flooring of the teacup marked with lines and I saw that my own form was turning blue and light like smoke and I could not hold onto Ben anymore because he already left and the sparkling colour of the pier had been shut off. The teacups no longer spin and twirled.

The world tilted and I tilted with it.

** ▬ **

Salt bubbled on my tongue and I felt the crinkle of paper between my hands. Muted shades of grey and black shifted and curled around me like shadowy figures swallowed me and I sank into the chair beneath me, confused and frightened.

Squared white light bloomed ahead of me and I understood with dim awareness that I was sitting in a movie-theatre with popcorn in my hands. Liquorice was snatched from my pocket and the splashing colours of the advertisements that played across the large screen warmed the familiar face of Number Five who turned to grin at me.

He tore one red stick of liquorice in half between his teeth. "It's called _sharing_ , Astrid. You should learn about it sometime."

There was a snort on his other side. "Yeah, right," Allison muttered. "Like _you_ would know anything about sharing, Five."

He slouched and kicked his shoes onto the rounded seat in front of him. "I resent that."

From somewhere in the murky blackness, a large, pale hand flashed in the light from the trailers and smacked at him. I recognised Luther, much younger, sitting on Allison's other side. He hissed, "Get your shoes off the damn chair, Five."

"Make me, you big jerk."

Lumpish shadows shifted and rose behind him. Another burst of light from a gunfight onscreen for some other trailer about an action film spattered light onto those shadows and showed Klaus. He shoved around Luther, flapping his hands to push off Ben who tried to hold him in place. He leaned across Luther who warned him to take his own seat, but Klaus was wormy and held out his scrunched carton.

"Who still has some popcorn? I ate all of mine and the stupid trailers are still showing. Astrid – psst, Astrid, gimme some of yours!"

Two pieces of liquorice smacked against his lip and silenced his whining. "Astrid and I bought this popcorn, asshole," Five spat, leaning back against his seat. "Not our fault you gobbled yours up before the first goddamn trailer finished."

"What was that you said about sharing?" Allison asked, rubbing her face tiredly.

In the dim light, Klaus scrambled from his seat and tried to squeeze himself along our row to reach me. He crushed emptied cartons of popcorn on the ground and slopped soda onto our siblings each time that he tripped into their holders, his lanky limbs kicking their shins. Then he finally launched himself forward, knocking his forehead right against mine. Klaus dug his bony elbow into my chest as he turned and settled on my lap, pressing one wet smacking kiss against my left eyebrow.

"There, all better!"

"Klaus!" Luther hissed. "Get back in your own seat, the movie is starting!"

Through squinted eyes, I saw the title card flash but Klaus' head blocked some of the letters from me.

There was an old cabin with a bench hanging from chains on its porch. The bench swung slowly in the wind, banging against the walls. It felt more like that bench dangled inside my head and thumped endlessly against the front of my forehead, not from Klaus having bumped against me, but from having slipped into the wrong body – because the body that I had wanted was comatose and perhaps that meant I would never find it and that if I did, it might be suspended in a warm and black womb-like state, much like how it had been to wake in this theatre without its lights on.

_And how will I make it back to Five? I can't communicate with anybody like this. I can only sit inside this old Astrid and watch what she did then, but I can't tell them what's happening, what will happen –…_

Klaus was crushing my legs and pinning me against the seat in his awkward attempt to right himself, though his hand was still firmly lodged in my popcorn and he was already attempting to stuff some more in his mouth.

"Really, I'm helping you," he said. "That much popcorn on your own would make you sick and I wouldn't want to see you unwell, Astrid."

"Are you okay?" Five asked me. "Klaus, you're crushing her."

"I'll have you know I'm very sensitive about my figure," Klaus said, shovelling more popcorn out from the carton and tipping it into his mouth.

Some bodiless voice floated up from the front of the theatre. "Would you mind keeping it down back there?"

"Sorry, sir," Luther called back.

"Bite me, asshole," Klaus called back.

There was a flashlight bobbing at the bottom of the stairs that led to our seats. It burned itself into my retinas and something about that felt cathartic and wanted in a moment when all else seemed insignificant.

There was a panicked whisper that sounded like _run_ from Luther. Suddenly coats were snatched from beneath seats, sodas toppled from holders, and they were scrambling and running and hopping over seats from either side of me. Klaus slid off my lap and bolted for the nearest exit and I remembered, with a fond and warm smile tugging at my lips, that we had snuck into a film with an age rating much too high for us and that they ran from an usher climbing the steps to throw us out.

I remembered it so abruptly that I stayed where I was until Five came back for me and yanked me from my seat to run behind him. The red-velvet doors swung shut ahead of us, because our siblings had rushed ahead of us. The usher was right behind us, reaching for my shoulder, fingertips brushing against fabric and blonde strands of hair. Five shoved me through the doors.

I stumbled into Diego and ran with him, breathlessly laughing at the ruddy-faced usher who cracked through the doors with his flashlight. Five teleported to my left and still had liquorice held between his smirking lips.

Bursting through another pair of doors, we ran into an alleyway that spanned the length of the theatre, one end hidden behind cardboard boxes with a flimsy gate and the other leading toward the parking lot.

Stood around in a circle, we looked toward Luther who considered each side and then said, "Okay, split up!"

Klaus smacked into Diego and Allison crashed into me and I stood on Ben's foot and Luther sighed.

"Okay, just…just go whichever direction you want and meet back at the house!"

Nodding, we tried again and this time managed to break off into smaller groups; Five and I rushed toward the parking lot, with Ben and Diego right behind us, but we lost them between the rows of cars.

Both of us had long since understood that the chase was over. There was no looming usher with arms outstretched to haul us into his dingy back-office lair, but we liked our flushed cheeks and thudding hearts so much that still we ran into the pale-blue beacon of the mall beside the theatre.

The shutters of most shops had already been drawn half-way down to the tiled flooring and languid shoppers dithered between window-shopping and sipping at sodas while wandering around just like us. Five still held my hand and we walked between the passers-by with an aimlessness that matched what I had felt on the pier, blinded by soft dull lights and a soft dull world whenever our father was not in it.

There were men with thick bands around their arms that read SECURITY and for one final burst of rebellion I pulled him into a photo-booth that seemed mostly unused, its bland photos of strangers on the side scribbled over with hard spiked moustaches and more vulgar doodles outlined in scratchy black marker. The photo-booth itself was cramped and small enough for one person alone, which meant he stood half-inside, half-outside, his shoulders draped in the flimsy blue curtain that formed its door.

I perched on the rotating stool and left enough space for him to squeeze on its other side, though it was still difficult and our shoulders rubbed together. There was something funny about it.

"Couldn't have found a bigger hiding place?" he asked.

"Hey, you said me something about sharing," I told him. "So at least I'm sharing this hiding place with you. You should be thanking me."

He smiled. "Don't I always say you should listen to me more? Look how well that turned out."

"Got a quarter?"

There was a small screen that, once he pushed his last coin into the slot, lit in wavering blue lines with our pale faces shown in-between. I turned to smooth down his hair, which had mussed itself in the flight from ushers and their flashlights, then pushed down his collar. He rolled his eyes and I thought he might slap my hands away, but he allowed it, sitting sullenly until I had finished. I faced the camera and pressed the shiny red button beneath the screen. I straightened myself on the stool, put on my best smile, and leaned into his shoulder.

There was a cartoonish countdown on the screen, its bubbled numbers popping up in warning.

He waited until it hit three to angle himself toward me and reach out to right my daisy-patterned clip, taking great delight in my surprise that distracted me long enough for those numbers to dwindle and a popping flash to fill the small photo-booth. It would take four photographs in a row and he had spoiled the first by making me look at him, gawk-eyed and with my mouth wide open to catch flies, like our mother often said.

"You should pay more attention, Astrid," he said.

The second flash caught me with my head cocked to study him, because I had decided to surprise him right back and waited until the third flash to press my lips against his cheek and revel in how it turned pink and warm. I smiled triumphantly for the final photograph, chin raised slightly, eyes focused on the screen.

He smiled, too. I was not sure if he even noticed himself on the screen because his eyes were on me.

The world was tilting and I broke through the mould again to tell him, "I don't want to go."

** ▬ **

The books was so old that their binding was vellum and their words had faded against yellowed parchment. I recited the words of a long-dead Greek poet aloud for my father and flinched when he smacked the table and corrected me. His monocle scraped at me, flashing and flashing its silver light. I lost track of where I had been and inwardly panicked, afraid that he would scold me more for it, but all that fear made it even harder to find my place on the page. I could feel the beady stares of the others around the table.

"Astrid," my father said, "I am –…"

"Should it be locative in that sentence?" Allison spoke up suddenly.

Our father paused, pale eyes swivelling toward her. "What did you say, Number Three?"

"In the last sentence," Allison said. "I'm just wondering why the case is locative."

Glaring, our father reached for another grammatical text in the cabinet behind him. While his eyes were elsewhere, Allison quickly glanced at me and smiled. She, too, would melt and disappear, but the warm feeling of love in my chest would not.

** ▬ **

Sitting on a chair in the house, I looked down at my wrist and saw the skin was puckered and red from the tattoo of our symbol, an umbrella rounded in a black circle. I looked at Five who sat beside me and saw that his wrist was the same. His eyes were sore and framed in pinkish-red from holding in pain. He had always been better at it than I had.

Between the chairs, hidden from the sight of our father, we held hands. He looked at me and smiled before he disappeared for another time; it hurt as much as the first to lose him, and I watched my own flesh peel away as the house vanished with me.

** ▬ **

There was the scent of fresh cotton that came from the bed-sheets tucked around me and the bristle of sheer curtains blown in a gentle breeze across the room dried out my eyeballs which rolled and blinked beneath paper-thin eyelids. Sunlight made the bedroom hot and sticky and golden. I had a clump of saliva in my throat, stuck in that hollow spot behind the curl of my tongue.

Somewhere to my left, Nancy Sinatra crooned: _strawberries, cherries and an angel's kiss in spring…_

The saliva choked me but I could not cough and I could not shift myself to dislodge it. I felt that this was my body – the body that I had left behind on the pavement and which I had slipped into as if shrugging on an old jumper, just like all those times in Pogo's study, settling back into my own limbs, my own mind.

I was myself again and I wept because of it.

"Something got you down today, Astrid?"

There was a hand that reached out from the inky black depths to my right and scrunched a tissue against my cheek and I cried even more because I remembered how Ben had done the same.

But it was Diego who wiped tears this time and there were not enough tissues for how much I wept and wept to hear him and understand that I had made it back with the pocket-watch, that it had worked, all those months of planning and hoping and telling Five that it would – that it _had to_ –…

"Guess we all got reasons to be down lately, huh?" he continued, tossing the tissues into a waste-bin which existed in the muddled parts of the room that I could not see, like great big splotches in my peripheral. "I heard from Klaus yesterday. Got himself arrested again, needed somebody to bail him out. Guess Eudora was right about me enabling him after all."

The sunlight behind him dimmed; he had blocked it with his shoulders hunched forward, his hand reaching out to hold mine. I felt the limpness of my hand and tried to force it into movement, to pull at my tendons like strings of an instrument. I had been wrapped in sheets and mummified, cast into place with arms bolted to my sides and forced into permanent stillness.

He brushed my knuckles and sighed. "I told Eudora about you, too. Not much, I mean. I thought that she would understand, you know? She has that kind of way about her. I said that you had an accident when you were a kid and here we are. She tried calling me last Sunday and thought I was ignoring her. I told her Sundays are when I sit with my little kid sister and I know you're not a kid but you are to me. I told her that I read to you and I listen to music with you and I do all the things I read about online that are supposed to help you. And that I don't care what Pogo or anybody else says. _It works_."

The world was tilting but I was holding onto him, _gripping_ him. But to him, my hand was pliant and without bones. The colour around him was slipping away, draining like it had drained Ben but Diego was unaware of it, his elbows sinking into the mattress in prayer, one hand still clasped around mine and the other rubbing tiredly at his face – his face which had shed its baby-fat and sharpened around the jawline and there was stubble, too.

I wanted to ask, _how old are you now? how long has it been? what do pogo and the others say?_

He leaned forward and dipped his head against my sheets, sighing. "I did tell Eudora something else," he mumbled. "I told her that I m-miss you."

The tears that had built up in me while in my astral form seemed to be unleashed and he reached for another clump of tissues that he swept across my cheeks, all the time speaking calmly and softly and with a voice much deeper than I remembered, but that was because too much time had passed and he had lost his baby-fat. His eyes glistened like mine and his lips pressed together before he stopped talking and lowered his face to my bed-sheets, his tense shoulders falling with him.

He rose again, breathed out and then laughed at himself, shaking his head. "All right," he murmured. "I'm gonna – I'm gonna head out. But I'll be back next Sunday like I promised. Probably sick of me by now, aren't you?"

Something left my mouth; it was not quite a word but rather a gurgle from that saliva trapped in my throat, and what frightened me more was that the sound seemed normal to him. He reached for his jacket, black leather, its lining cutting silver in the sunlight from the knives he had hidden there, too. The machines beeped, the wires pockmarked my arms.

The golden light was flickering into dull shades of grey. I felt its heat only moments ago, but that too was fading, leaving me empty and heavy.

I heard Number Five say, " _Astrid_?"

But it echoed and sounded far from here.

Diego threw on his jacket and slid his arms into its sleeves, shaking out the wrinkles before he glanced over at me and paused.

"Astrid?" Diego said uncertainly.

Slowly his arms fell and his hands rested on the bed, his face moving close to mine. Was it something that showed in my eyes? Something different than the cool blankness that must have been there before? I felt my heart thudding and thudding so violently that I was sure the machines would tell him that I was in here, that I was trying furiously to communicate with him but there was some kind of delay between my mind and body.

I would try to twitch my hand and put all my strength into doing so, but it would remain still and useless until moments later, when already I had started to focus on something else, my hand would spasm and twitch like I had wanted.

Yet I could blink. I could blink when in all my other bodies, I had not been able to do even that minute movement.

I forced my eyelids shut, pulled open, forced shut, paused for a few seconds and then began once more to force and pull and force and pull until Diego turned pale and moved closer to me without realising it, mouthing the letters: H – E – R – E.

"Here," he breathed out. "You're here."

He said it again, disbelief flooding him, but he continued with me, sounding out each letter like he had done with our mother in his childhood, tripping up on certain letters, but now he could say them without difficulty though he spoke through cracks in his voice and his eyes welled with tears.

A - L - I - V - E.

"Alive," he nodded. "You got this Astrid, come on - come on, sweetheart, you got this, keep going. Can you tell me where you are? Are you - are you _trapped_?"

It was becoming harder. There was a ringing in my eardrums that stuffed my skull and wedged itself around my eyeballs, holding them in place, but still my eyelids flicked and flicked because it might be the last time that I could tell him anything. I tried to think of another word, something precise that would warn him about the future, warn him that the world would end and we had the date and I started again to spell it out for him: M – A…

"I'm following," he said. "I'm with you."

Dark blue patches bled through the ceiling like paint dripped from a room overhead and I felt the blueness fall onto me, creeping into the hollow pits where once there had been golden sunlight. Sinatra was cut through with white noise and her words were distorted, chopped and turning low and grizzly. I felt my eyelids stiffen and hold in place.

I wanted to tell him, _I'm here but I'm going again, even if I don't want to because I fought so hard to find you. I miss you, too. I miss you._

The world did not tilt this time; it collapsed inward, like a building crumbling while I was still inside it, its innards filled with dust blown outward through its windows, shattering glass onto streets below and then its floors dipped from underneath the soles of my shoes and I floated before the fall.

I tasted copper on my tongue and then I was crushed.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

I latched onto the sound of Five calling out to me in the dark.

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Lain against the soil, I felt its wetness and coldness and I was sure that I had accidentally thrown myself into another version of myself, certain that I would look around and find the younger versions of my siblings stood around me, confusion on their faces, shrugging off the weirdness of me as the weirdness of us all as a family and moving onward about their day without realising that there was more than one Astrid in my head – that the astral form, I realised, allowed me not only leave the most current body that I had been in, but also to sift through its memories and replay them like a film.

Pogo would have been amazed. He would have allowed me to experiment someplace safer than where I ended up. He would have _helped_ me. But he was gone and felt more like those long-dead poets I had read about.

I pushed myself off the ground and looked around at the bare trees that neither shivered nor moved, like they had been painted against the grey backdrop of the clouds. There was a cart that sat between them, missing one wheel, its broken side sinking into the ground.

Strung between the trees, I saw the tarp that Five had used for his fort, pinned down with small pegs to hold it in place. It hung like the skin of a dead animal stretched out and dried. Beneath it sat a small patch of branches that had been burnt and left in a pile, decorated with a dirtied pot and spoon, its silver crusted with something brown and lumpy.

I had been here before. I had been here with Five. I was in our future.

But the snow had melted. Time had passed.

I could touch the mud that crusted around the ditches and it pulled away with my shoes in tacky strings. It was a feeling that would not last long, because my hands had started to tingle and my mouth was becoming slack. I was separating myself from physical to astral and the delay that existed between them made itself apparent again.

Before my sense of touch could leave me, I reached to stroke the buds of deadened flowers in the ground and marvelled at their softness, wondering how before I had never noticed the delicacy of things around me.

"Astrid!"

Five had shouted somewhere behind me and I spun around, heart and lungs and stomach dropping down into my shoes at the sight of him bolting across desert-like land, its soil cracked and broken and never refreshed even in rainfall, because something chemical had gotten underneath it and settled like a disease in its core. He pushed himself forward to reach me and I ran too, blotting out that vast space between us.

I was still half-formed, some parts still turning to smoke and others strong and present and he could tell that there was something wrong with me when he reached me, his eyes roaming over the bluish colour.

"I'm coming back," I told him, "but it takes me some time, I think. I want you to be the last thing that I feel if I have to go back to my astral form –…"

I wrapped my right arm around him and hugged him close, once again wanting to weep but finding that the tears hardened against my lashes and balanced there like dense pearls rather than liquid, because I could not cry in my astral form. Five, with whom I had really only ever held hands and kissed on his cheek, seemed unsure of how to hold himself when I hugged him, but soon his arms were around me and he breathed in against my neck and he said, "I thought you were gone forever."

I could only hold him until my right arm, too, lost feeling and turned to smoke and tendrils; we pulled apart knowing that we might never hold each other again.

"I was wrong," I said. "The pocket-watch worked but not like how I planned. Not like how I _wanted_."

"It doesn't matter," he said, even if truthfully it was all that mattered and it showed in the glassiness of his eyes.

"How long?"

He understood what I was asking. "Three months."

Three months, he had been alone. It had aged him and I worried that it had done far more than that, taking in how he wilted back into himself and his eyes glared around him – not quite at me, but it was close, like it was hard for him to separate me from the dirt and grime of his existence. I told him what had happened but lingered most on my short time with Diego.

"Guess the astral stuff is just as crappy and unpredictable as all the time travel stuff." He smiled; it looked watery and lifeless. "I started writing equations while you were gone, equations that would bring me back. Now that you made it back to me, I'm thinking the equations need to be modified. You couldn't make it back completely and I think it might be because you need a portal to do it. You came here through one. You can only go back through one, so neither of us gets left behind."

"I didn't want to leave you," I said.

"I know you didn't." He licked his lips. "But the equations will work where the pocket-watch didn't. I want to get back to them, to our family. I would do anything, Astrid. Anything asked of me."

"I know," I said gently. "I know."

His throat bobbed. "It isn't a life here, alone – not one worth living."

Five looked through me; he watched the dead trees, barren and black and taunting him.

"Don't go again," he said. "I don't want you to go."

**▬**


	4. during: four

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

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_during: four_

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Other than pocket-watches, Pogo used to make tiny ships held within bottles, their glass soon fogged and clouded from the stuffiness in his study. He would bring the bottles down from their shelves and brush off the dust that had clotted around their lids, settling them on his desk and slipping into his armchair before I climbed onto his lap.

Together we created little stories for the invisible men he told me ran from bow to stern and back again behind the minute carved windows. We frightened them with our largeness, he said, casting shadows against the milky glass which cocooned them into their world, and so the men would run from us. We would imagine little battles for them with the other ships and call out the names of the captains we had invented – Captain Beaver against Captain Pomme and all their little crewmates whose personalities had blossomed between stories.

I wondered if Pogo still remembered them like I did while Five slept inside the fort and I climbed the rising of a ditch, hauling Delores along in the red wagon that I could now pull by myself, tugging it behind me with astral energy. I would lift her with that same energy and prop her on the grass beside me. I would wait for the tiredness in me to pass and then smooth down her ruffled shirt, looking into her painted eyes.

I would tell her about the invisible men in their ships and how we had named them. I would tell her about Pogo.

"He had all sorts of different ships," I said. "He knows everything about them. When I was little, I thought there was nothing in this universe that Pogo didn't know. Something else about him is that he never talks down to you if you ask him something. Not like Dad used to do."

The sun rose from between the distant hills, bleached-white and seeping its light into the world. Because it was just Delores, I let her in on a little secret that I had been afraid to tell anybody, even Five, whose snores rumbled from the fort behind us.

I told her, "I miss my father but I don't miss Reginald Hargreeves."

**▬**

Brown rings marked the spots in the ground where water lapped against the shore of the cove, its rounded bend of sand littered with great husks of blackened driftwood and charred shells. Yellowish foam clumped atop the water and shifted apart in thick chunks when he scooped his bottle into its muddied depths, reluctantly tipping it over himself and scrubbing at his dirtied jaw; it washed the hardened grime that stuck to his chest and jaw and arms but did little for the spots of filth which clung to the clothes that he dipped into the lake afterward, leaving them stretched-out on the sand for the sunlight to dry.

Then he climbed the rocks to sit with me and watch another sunset dip behind the hills, his skin flushed in freckles along the bridge of his nose and the hint of a burn forming on his shoulders. His ribcage was stark, lined in bumpy ridges that showed his hunger and I wondered if this was really the guessing-game that we should be playing after all. We had gotten into the habit of guessing-games – _if you were home, what would you do first? if you were home, who would you want to talk to first? if you were home…_

"Strawberry milkshakes," he said, his hands laced behind his head, eyes shut, "from that dump of a diner on Albert Street with the broken air-conditioner that makes it feel like a sauna in summertime."

I smiled. "Nope. Keep guessing."

"That snobby café on Milford Lane." His cheeks dimpled. "Allison liked it because of all those photographs of celebrities on the wall. Said hers would be up there one day. Wonder if she made it on the wall."

"No," I answered finally. "But the others were with us when we went there. Well, at least the last time that we went there."

He kicked one leg over the other and let his foot bounce while he mulled over that hint. Soon he snorted and shook his head. "Did Klaus happen to barf behind this fine establishment after eating too many doughnuts?"

"Maybe."

He grinned cockily. "And did Klaus _maybe_ ask that Luther carry him to the house because he was seeing a suspicious tunnel filled with white light and was convinced he would die from eating so many doughnuts?"

"All right, you got me – just put me out of my misery, Five."

"Oh, but I do love to make you miserable." He rolled his eyes to look at me. "Fine. Griddy's."

"I knew you would figure it out."

His hand flattened against his forehead to shade his face. "You know, I admire the fact that Klaus can be delusional enough to think he'd ever make it through the pearly gates."

"I think his rap sheet must be longer than the Bible."

"Oh, much longer. But then again, Luther _is_ our altar boy, so maybe he can put in a good word."

"And how many good words do you think he would need for the rest of us?"

Five pursed his lips. "You're right. We're screwed. Until then, we make a plan. First thing we'll do on the other side is get some doughnuts at Griddy's. Promise?"

I smiled again and held out my little finger for him to hook around his own. "Promise."

For all its mutated colour and clumpish algae, the lake offered some comfort in the gentle lap of water onto sand, shifting pinkish-red shells from its bottom and slopping them onto the shoreline. Then, teasingly, drawing them in again with gentle waves that tipped upward and fell down until all the world seemed made of that soft sound of shells clinking and water swirling.

I asked, "Where would you have chosen, if you had to pick the first place to eat from on the other side?"

He shrugged and covered his face with his arm. "Anywhere that would let me clog my arteries with deep-fried goodness sounds just peachy to me. Let me gorge myself on greasy doughnuts and die in the gutter like the glorious death I always envisioned for myself."

I scoffed at him. "Yeah, right. You'll drink yourself to death with too much coffee."

"Good point. Besides, Klaus already claimed the gutter for himself and I simply cannot bring myself to take away his one source of joy in life."

The shells clinked; the water swirled. "I read the last chapter that Vanya wrote, you know," I said. "Just to wonder if any of them are happier now or – or just to torture myself, maybe. I like to think that things got better for all of them."

His arm slid sluggishly from his face. "Yeah, well," he grumbled, "between the two of us, you were always the optimistic one."

**▬**

Another morning, I told Delores about Diego. It was accidental. I let his name slip and glanced nervously at her like I had broken some sworn promise in myself not to tell anybody about him, to stuff him down into the deep pit that had hollowed itself in my stomach after so much time without him.

It was different with Delores. She had never known Diego like we had, never known the house or its weird dynamic like we had. Never known what it was like to hear my name spoken with fondness by my family but the harsh barking cut of Number Eight called out like it had been by my father.

"I was walking with Dad one time," I said. "I saw this little pigeon on the pavement, its neck bent sideways like it had smashed right into the window of the shop. And it had, because there was a little red spot on the glass. I asked Dad what happens to little birds who smash into windows – is there a heaven for them?"

Delores waited expectantly; her pale features were pooled in sunlight.

"He told me that what happens to little birds is what happens to us: _nothing_." I smiled at Delores. "He said there is no such thing as heaven, not for me and not for little birds. Maggots eat your eyeballs and worms burrow into your arms and the world moves on without you."

Her smile was soft and understanding.

"I had nightmares for almost a month," I continued. "Diego passed my bedroom one night and noticed that I was sitting in bed, on top of the blankets, forcing myself not to fall asleep and when he asked what was making me so upset, I told him. He slept beside me all night and in the morning, he disappeared after training. I looked around and found him in the garden, stood on a bench and trying to nail a little box to a tree. I realised it was a birdhouse – one that he had made himself."

I started to laugh and Delores looked serenely at the hills ahead of us, amused.

"He had trouble finding paint because Klaus had used it all in some kind of project that involved painting himself while in the nude and rolling around on sheets. So Diego used what was left – a really nice blue colour."

I remembered how he had looked in the armchair in that room with fresh linen in the air and golden sunlight and then felt the phantom touch of his hand around mine. I flexed my hand and hoped that on the other side, he might feel it, if he was still there. If he still waited for me like I waited for him.

"He told me that the little birds could separate their souls from their bodies right before they flew into the windows like that pigeon I had seen. They could do it just like I did and they were probably flying around me right then in their astral forms and there were no maggots or worms to bother them. They could hang out together in that little birdhouse. God, I haven't thought about that birdhouse in a long time. I'm not even sure it's still there."

I sighed.

"That's Diego for you," I mumbled. "Soft as soft can be but never wants to admit it. Maybe tomorrow I can tell you about Luther."

**▬**

In the margins of the book that Vanya had written, he scrawled winding equations that then started to fill the small gaps between the lines and soon the slip inside the cover was a splotch of fractions and figures slopping downward from where he had been walking while adding and multiplying and taking away until one afternoon while we trudged from one campsite to another, he stood completely still, cocked his head at the book clasped in his hands and said, "I think this might be it."

**▬**

The orange flames of the campfire darkened his face and drew out its anxieties, for his mouth was pursed, his eyes suspect, following the lines of equations like a witch peering into her spell-book, chanting, summoning. The fire was crackling and spitting and spinning between us. I felt watched and glanced behind us. Delores was peering out from between the slit in the fort.

Once caught, her gaze flicked away quickly to other things.

Five began mumbling the figures aloud like that might solidify them and the sound of his voice was all that echoed into the emptiness of the barren field.

The blackness of the sky, the blackness of the ground, all of it blurred together until there was no sense of _above_ and _below_ and _in front_ and _behind_ , like when a drowning person loses their understanding of seabed and surface. He had not eaten in a while. His cheeks were more hollow. His paleness was not from lack of sunlight, the shakiness in his hands not quite from fear but from having missed meals in the past few months. It was hard for him to lug around the rifle that he had found. He was always tired.

So, we were sinking and willing to take shots at things that seemed dangerous.

Five had tried many times over the years to bring himself back to our world. But it had never gotten further than blue light shimmering from his fists and odd, warping sounds cutting through the dead heat of the air in this world.

But we were sinking and willing.

"If the portal opens," he said. "You go through it, whether I'm with you or not."

"What about Delores?"

"I can't bring her with me." His throat rippled; hunger or uncertainty or both blended together. "I said my goodbyes. She understands."

"All right."

I felt the crackle and spit and spin of my nerves and it gnarled my hands into fists. I wanted to hold my pocket-watch for comfort, but it sat in the red wagon, disused, its glass full and clouded from the cool shift into fall and I could hold nothing, not even him. He wavered when he stood. He had long since outgrown his uniform and wore clothes that hung loose around his frame. If he had been better fed, they would fit him perfectly.

"If the portal opens," he said again.

Sparks of blue light cut from his palms and fizzled in the stifling dull air of this world, filling it with momentary sound – a sudden pop into the vacuum that his power created. I watched the portal wheel and wheel around his hands like he spun thread, though it was weak and fluffed around its edges.

I was afraid it would bring him back and that I would remain in the vacuum of sound, unhearing, unseeing; _cowardly girl that you are, Astrid,_ I said to myself, _and not even a little girl anymore_ , _so what excuse have you to hold him_ _here, you should want him to make it back, he would be happier_ – …

Blood ran from his nostrils and coloured his lips that before had been chapped and white. I lost all sense of cursing myself for cowardice and stood, frightened, silent. Never had his nose bled but he kept pushing the blue light, his mouth pressed into a tight line, his hands trembling. There was some semblance of a portal pushing from him.

But it was turning from blue to darkened navy and its soft edges started to spike.

"Five," I called warily, "I think you should stop now."

The blue was rapidly fading but the blood from his nose was thick and bright and unforgiving. Suddenly he snorted in an odd, choking manner that made me flinch and jolt back from him, my heart alight, my stomach churning and my hands wishing to clamp themselves against my ears and block out that awful sound.

Blood followed – more of it that burst from him in another bizarre snort before his body collapsed sideways into the dirt and the vacuum of sound shrivelled up and dispelled itself.

"Five?" I whispered his name. I could not bear to speak any louder. " _Five_?"

His eyes rolled in pure white and then came his pupils, his focus. I could not touch him but ran to stand beside him. He had curled into himself, spine curved, legs tucked in. He threw his head back and another snort came with blood spat onto the dirt beneath him.

"Did you see a portal?"

"Yes," I said. "But it wasn't – it didn't look normal. Not like the ones you've made before, I mean."

"I'll try again," he said, pushing himself from the ground.

He swayed, stumbled forward, then dropped again. This time, he stayed down.

**▬**

There was a tiny furrow between his brows. It was a little crescent-shaped dent that deepened as he tossed and mumbled to himself, blood crusted around his nostrils. The sunlight harshened it, waxing white and liquid against his skin. I leaned forward that one morning and even though I could not touch him, I imagined it in my head like a quick kiss on his forehead and then I settled back, cross-legged.

"There," I said. "All your troubles taken away for me to carry instead."

**▬**

Delores had slept well and wanted to hear about Luther, so I brought her onto a hill while Five slept some more. Normally he stumbled from the fort at dawn but he had slept fitfully throughout the night and needed more sleep for the long journey to another dark, blackened field somewhere far from here. He was sluggish, now. He struggled more. He had eaten the last of his canned food and neither of us had spoken about what should be done tonight, hoping that he might instead come across some stockpile in another bunker or the trunk of a shrivelled-up car.

Delores and I did not need food, did not need anything.

"There was this bank robbery," I said. "We had a lot of those. Dad sets off the alarm in the house and we all jump into our little costumes. He wanted us to call them uniforms, but I called them costumes because of the masks. Off we go, into the bank. Luther gives orders, Diego adds his own two cents and we start to pick off the robbers one by one. I remember looking up at them and thinking how big they were – _grown men_ , Delores, against kids who were maybe ten years old at the time."

Wind began to curl through the trees and tear chunks of withered grass from the soil, so dried and gasping that it simply broke away.

"One guy was behind me. I didn't see him. He was aiming for me. Ten years old," I said. "Luther stood between me and that guy. He would have taken the bullet and I didn't even know until Five knocked the gun from the guy's hand and I turned around to see what was happening. Luther would have taken a _bullet_ for me. He didn't even think about it. I asked him, ' _weren't you afraid, Luther?_ '

Delores looked at me patiently. Perhaps she had noticed the weak shiver in my voice.

"He said, ' _Of course I was afraid_ , _Astrid. He would have shot_ _you_.' It didn't even cross his mind that I meant afraid for _himself_."

I breathed in and breathed out, one deep exhale that helped settle my nerves.

"He would do more for Five than I can like this," I added. "He isn't well. You see it, don't you?"

Delores agreed mutely with the arch of her artfully-painted brow.

**▬**

The bony skeletal trees curled and danced against the unnatural yellow shade of the clouds. It was a colour that my mother would have called _butterscotch_ had she chosen it for our embroidery. The red wagon rattled on its little path right behind Five who pulled its handle, his tall frame slanted forward, his stare focused on some blank dark spot beyond the road. Delores was slumped inside the wagon, blandly smiling at the burnt-up shrubs which speckled our route. I walked behind them, thinking of Captain Beaver and Captain Pomme, looking out at their own fogged-up worlds like we did.

The wagon jolted against a bump in the dirt and its back right-hand wheel sparked and fell off before the wagon itself toppled sideways, spilling pots and pans into the field that ran alongside us. Delores rolled out and Five caught her, crashing to the ground on his knees. Behind him, the wagon fell fully and out slopped his books and old boots, which sank wetly into the mud. He spun around with his eyes wide and mad, his head snapping toward me.

"You couldn't have caught those, Astrid?"

The pocket-watch had dropped into the mud too and its golden edges were clotted in the soil. He stood and then stooped to collect the books, wiping their covers of mud and clumps of grass.

"I'm sorry."

"Useless," he muttered under his breath; it stung as badly as if he had screamed it.

Throwing the books into the wagon, he then stormed around to find the wheel that had broken off. I could pluck little things from the soil too, with astral energy, though it took a lot out of me. Still, I wanted to quell any arguments that could happen and so kept my mouth shut. He was fraught with tension and hunger and it showed in the rising of the bluish veins on his arms and the purple stains under his eyes and silver strands in his otherwise dark mop of long hair.

"Are you ignoring me now?" he asked. "You're good at ignoring people. I don't need to read Vanya's book again to know that."

"I'm not ignoring you," I said calmly. "I think you're tired and hungry and lashing out."

"Do not _belittle_ me, Astrid," he said sharply. "I'm not a kid and neither are you. What we _are_ , is two people stuck in this hellhole."

"And who got us here?"

Delores' normally neutral lips had soured and turned downward. Her sharp jawline bothered me. _Her_ siding with _him_ bothered me. He had told me that we were not children yet I wanted terribly to stomp and march away from them to someplace calmer where I might think a little while and then, reluctantly, slouch back to him hours afterward with mumbled apologies that he would accept and return and we would continue walking together and Delores would bob between us on the red wagon.

But I had rooted myself to the ground and I could not think in that moment of ever apologising to him for anything. It was _him_ , I thought spitefully, who owed _me_ an apology. There was nobody in the world that I loved more than Five. Nobody, too, who could make me so angry.

"All right," he said. "I deserved that one. But who gave me the idea to time-travel in the first place?"

Luther was not around to separate us and I felt the tension bubbling, frothing, spilling over.

"What?"

He was stalking toward me, his mouth pulled tight in the imitation of a smile. "The book, Astrid," he said. "About the astronaut. Who gave that to me? Luther? Please. We'd be lucky if he read ' _The Very Hungry_ _Caterpillar_ ' in his spare time. The only thing Klaus probably reads are pamphlets about damn _drug addiction_ and evidently he hasn't kept up with his reading list, has he? And maybe he gets his rights read to him after every arrest but that's about it."

"Five – …"

" _You_ gave it to me." His bark of laughter was like the tip of a needle pressed against skin, seeking veins, puncturing, pushing in. "And _you_ chose to follow me. I never made you do anything. Vanya was right about a lot of things. _Everyone_ has to look after _Astrid_ , _everyone_ has to make sure _she's_ okay. Hell, look at me – I'm doing the same thing right now."

"I took care of you too, Five. When you tried to go back and you passed out, I took care of you."

"Gee, aren't you just a damn saint," he replied. "Doing the bare minimum to make sure I don't croak."

I glared at him. "You know, the others said enough about you to warrant a book of their own."

"Oh, please, enlighten me," he snorted.

"Mean, snotty, uptight little _know-it-all_ who thinks he's the only one who matters," I listed off.

"Wow, never realised they were so spot-on in their observations."

"And they couldn't understand why I'd even bother with you," I finished. "And maybe they were right."

Then the butterscotch colour of the clouds melted into powder-blue and lilac and somewhere between those shifting tones, it seemed that my heart stopped; it was sudden and abrupt just like how it had been for the wagon, rolling forward one moment until its wheel popped and broke off from the rest of it and it fell dumb and useless to the ground. I shuddered like cold water had been thrown against me and my mouth had that same slackness to it that told me something was happening to my body on the other side.

"Whatever," Five grumbled, crouched beside the wagon. "I don't think I have the right screw for this damn wheel. If you had just –…."

He turned around. His face was colourless – the world was colourless, tilting but not fully turning, like it was a record stuck and jaggedly attempting to spin despite being held in place. He stepped toward me, reaching out right as I reached for him, but a force was pulling me backward and I collapsed into the ground – _against_ it, hard and corporeal for one brief second before I lost him.

**▬**

Cold hard pads pressed against my ribcage. I tasted hot warm copper and my blubber-tongue flopped around my mouth and I heard the gentle _tick-tick-tick_ of a pocket-watch and I thought, _but mine fell in the mud, so whose watch is that?_

**▬**

I looked for the birdhouse but could not find it and so flew back to where I had been before.

**▬**

There was a dust-cloud coming toward me, made from bulbous tumours which bloomed large and popped and reformed on some other fat ball on the cloud to push itself forward. I felt that I could not be dead if the dust-cloud was still coming toward me. I was stretched out on the ground and watching it with my head turned to the right where the charred meadows were.

When I tilted my head back, I could see the scuffed red paint of the wagon dropped on its side like it had been earlier. I wondered how it had gotten there.

"Five?"

He kneeled beside me, his head tilted back to take in the clouds. He looked down, cheeks oddly glinting in the light, but soon the dust-cloud rolled across us and his silhouette flashed between the gaps in the white lashing gales. The cloud disappeared, finished with a bleating sigh. I could see him more clearly.

He was ashen-faced and breathing heavily like he could not find enough air in this world, even without the dust-cloud smothering him.

"I thought you were gone," he said slowly. " _Really gone_ , this time."

"Something happened with my body."

"Was it Diego? Did he call you back again?"

"No," I answered. "I don't think so. But I heard a pocket-watch."

Five swallowed thickly and brushed the dust from his hair, from his shoulders, from anywhere that would allow him not to look at me too; or allow me to look at him any more closely than I already did, noting how his hands trembled and his eyes had turned hard and glassy. Delores told me that he had been frightened.

"Three months," he mumbled awkwardly. "You were gone three months, last time."

"Guess I made myself a new record," I said. "Not more than a few minutes this time."

His eyes met mine. "Astrid, you were gone for an hour."

"But you were still here, in the same spot," I said. "Right beside me."

"When you left the last time, I stayed in the same spot too," he told me. "Until the weather worsened and I had to find more food and I walked for miles during the night and then came back in the morning and waited. I was sure that if you did return, it would be to that place and it made sense to be as close as possible so you would find me."

"Do you think –…"

I trailed off, afraid that speaking the words aloud might induce some kind of reality to them that would have otherwise remained dormant and benign. But not speaking had worried him that something was happening to me again and he lurched forward, hand held out when still he could not touch me.

"I'm okay, Five."

"What were you going to ask me?"

"I don't want to say it. It might make the whole thing worse."

His face was stern, almost like our father would have looked at me. "Astrid…"

"Do you think my body is dying?"

Blankness rippled from his brow, unknitting the tight knot that topped the bridge of his nose, smoothing his coiled mouth. Only his throat bobbed; the rest of him was cast in stillness, like Medusa had turned her eye to him or perhaps now it was Delores with imagined snakes atop her rounded bald mannequin head.

"No," he said. "It was the pocket-watch."

"We're older now, Five," I said gently. "How long has it been since the last time I tried to use that watch?"

He recoiled from me. "Twenty years," he answered. "Give or take."

"So maybe we should just _consider_ –…"

"I never meant to say that you were useless." He was pale and unsure of himself. "You know that, right? I was just being an asshole."

Slowly I drank in his nervousness and understood that this was not like Five had always been. Before, he had leapt into portals and ignored our father and I was sure that that part of him still existed. But he was frightened too. He feared loneliness like I did and he feared that his attempts to return to our world would only end in blood-encrusted nostrils and hours of sleep that did nothing for his grogginess. I tried to be softer, like Diego, like our mother, like Pogo, to make him feel better.

"Would it help if I told you that you're never _not_ an asshole?"

His smile was watery.

"Besides," I added, "I was an asshole too. There are plenty of reasons why I like being around you."

"Even if I'm a – what was it again?"

I said instantly, "Mean, snotty, uptight little _know-it-all_ who thinks he's the only one who matters."

"Right. That." He looked at me. "I thought that I would have done it sooner by now, you know? Gotten us home, I mean. I was sure that I had the equations right."

"You'll get there, Five."

"Always the optimist."

I rolled my eyes. "Someone in this family had to be."

**▬**

"Allison wanted to be a star," I told Delores. "She used to write scripts and make me act them out with her. I was always her go-to side character, you know? I was the shopkeeper, the librarian, the cashier who had small lines while she had the monologues. She would bring me to the theatre and I would watch her, in the dark, mouthing lines. She had seen those movies so many times that she could have jumped on-screen and taken over for the lead actress if she wanted. She was on posters before we were nine years old. I tried to tell her that she could do it on her own and she didn't need her powers or the Academy to get her where she wanted to be."

I tipped Delores and smiled at her.

"Maybe if we make it back, I can go to the movies by myself and mouth her lines. It'll be her up there and I'll tell everybody she's my sister. She made it."

Delores shrugged, suggesting Allison had just used her powers.

"I know, I know," I sighed. "But old habits die hard, Delores."

**▬**

The fall had tapered into colder winds. He huddled inside the fort and stared blankly at the dull brown soil. He reached for a cockroach and its thin limbs fought against him, bucked and swivelled around onto his palm, down his wrist. His bloodshot eyes followed its path two seconds slower than he should have.

"I would understand, Five," I said.

He caught the cockroach before it could slip under the cuff of his sleeve and bite into its hardened shell.

**▬**

One corner of a diner had survived the blast. It stood like the set of a film, because it had only a half-charred booth and two walls and one of those walls had a chalkboard with the specials still written on it, though its chalk was smeared at the bottom. Its tiled flooring was there too, though jagged and splintered around its edges where the roof had caved in and crushed it.

Five climbed the rubble and I phased through it to stand in front of that booth. Giddiness overcame us and we started to laugh madly, so taken by this one slice of normality that existed in all the ruin.

"Sit, Five."

He looked at me. "Why?"

"Just sit."

He slid into the booth, gently touching its padding. It was burnt and pockmarked in holes.

I stood beside the booth and smiled at him. "What can I get you, sir?"

He rolled his eyes. "Come on, Astrid."

"Oh, lighten up, old man. Have some fun. What can I get you?"

His pale eyes drifted toward the chalkboard. "Well," he started, "I think cherry pie sure sounds good, but I gotta ask if the ingredients are fresh. Watching what I eat, you know."

"The freshest in the state," I said. "You from outta town?"

Five's lips twitched. I loved his smile more than anything. "Oh, sure. Someplace you've probably never heard of."

"Always wanted to travel to the big city," I grinned. "Get out of this town and do something more than work in a diner."

"Maybe someday you'll do it. For now, I think I'll take the cherry pie."

"Coming right up."

There was nothing around that we could use for props and so he slid from the booth and stood, still amused.

"Would you pick this place over Griddy's?"

Light and warm, I glanced at him. "What do you mean?"

"Griddy's," he said again.

His eyes sought something in me and I felt lost, adrift. I tried to remember what he was talking about but I felt blank and clean.

"Astrid," he said carefully, delicately, like he spoke to an infant. I prickled at his tone. "Do you remember what I'm talking about? About Griddy's and going there first?"

"Yes," I answered; a bold-faced lie. "Of course I do."

His throat bobbed and he nodded. "All right."

"I do," I insisted.

"All right," he repeated. "Let's go back to Delores now. I bet she's waiting on us."

**▬**

All throughout that afternoon, his eyes lingered on me.

**▬**

The snowfall came abrupt and heavy one night, dripping downward like fluff from blank white clouds onto blank white ground and the white of his beard. He drank from a bottle of wine. It stained his lips and made him seem more alive. He began to laugh.

"Remember last winter?" He tipped the bottle and swallowed another mouthful. "Said it would be our last in this dump. Well, bottoms up, baby."

**▬**

Then came the morning that I felt it again, the strange shift in colours around me but my heart was beating, I did not feel so nauseated and confused. I was sitting on a log and I tapped my fist against my chest, like it might squash the sense of discomfort there. It was not pain, not anything torturous. It was just the feeling that something was not right, that I was being split again. I watched Five trudge through the snow to sit beside me and he pulled down his scarf from around his mouth.

"Is it bothering you again?"

I watched the hills turn from green to yellow to blue. "What?"

"That feeling in your chest," he said. "You had it yesterday, too."

"Oh, yeah." I looked at him and he had no colour at all, which I much preferred. It hurt my eyes less to look at him. "It feels like a bird flying around inside my chest, sometimes."

"Could use that birdhouse that Diego built, huh?"

"How do you know about that?"

Five leaned away from me. I had not noticed how close he had gotten. "Astrid," he said. "You told me and Delores. Remember?"

"I don't remember you being there."

"All right," he said. "All right."

"It isn't all right." I swallowed. "I don't remember."

"I know," he said. His voice was sore, hoarse. "I think there's something – with your body and mind being apart this long – I don't think you're – …"

He stood quickly and yanked his scarf around his mouth, hurrying toward the trees nearby.

**▬**

He was gone for a long time and when he came back, he told me that he had found some food in a suitcase and that things were looking up for us because he had been working on the equations and he said he had fixed the bicycle to attach to the cart so it would be easier for him to pull it and I kept quiet because I had forgotten, too, that we had ever left the red wagon behind on the road that day when we fought.

**▬**

"Astrid," he said one night, "I need you to know that I really do love you. I've never said it. But I do."

I looked over at him. "I love you too."

"I just need you to hear it." He was running his hands through his hair. "And the next time it happens, we'll be more prepared."

"Did something happen?"

Miserably, his hands fell to his lap. "No," he said. "Nothing. I'm planning ahead, is all."

**▬**

The Argyle library had survived, somewhat. It looked more like a butchered colosseum than anything, one ring of its once towering floors still left behind in the ash and ruin. Tarp billowed from its rafters, caught on the wooden poles and steel frames that criss-crossed its rubble. The winter had faded while I was looking elsewhere.

Five was reading to me because I could not hold the book myself at the moment. I could not hold many things. I liked hearing his voice more, anyway. I looked at the cover and started to laugh because it was about the astronaut, that damned astronaut who had brought us here.

Five paused. "Well, figured it would cheer us up somehow. Surprised they even had it. Then again, they sure had a lot of erotica back there. Who knew a library had such filthy stuff, Astrid?"

I rolled my eyes at him. "I'm sure you read the whole collection."

"I might have." He turned a page in the book about the astronaut. "Are we gonna keep going or what?"

"Tell me how it ends."

He smoothed out the curled, yellowed edge of the page. "He fixes his spaceship," he said. "And flies back to Earth."

I laughed again. "You big liar. He burns up in the atmosphere."

"I should have stuck with the erotica. At least they have… _happier endings_."

"You're disgusting. Worse than Klaus." I felt tired and wished that I could sleep, but it would never happen in this form. "Mom used to call me her little astronaut."

"I know," he said softly. "I know."

Rubble skid and fell beside us. I imagined some little insect crawling over the pebbles and looked to find it in the dust but saw only the cool pale legs of a woman delicately stepping through stones and dust instead.

"I think something is wrong with me again, Five. I'm seeing someone."

Five scrambled for the rifle and gripped it. "Astrid, I see her too."

Hot, burning realisation ripped through me. I was not suffering another odd astral vision after all. I rushed to stand beside him. She was the sole person we had seen in decades. She frightened us for that reason alone, having become so accustomed to each other that any outsider made us bristle and defend ourselves like a pair of wild animals. I remembered the stuffed hyenas, the lions.

The woman pulled down her sunglasses and smiled. "Five," she said politely. "Pleased to finally meet you."

"Who the Hell are you?"

"I'm here to help. Now, in order to do that, I would also request that you ask dear Astrid to make herself visible to me, too."

Five hesitated. Then, finally and reluctantly, he said, "Not until you tell me what you want."

She took another step forward and smiled.

"I already told you what I want," she said. "To _help_ you. But perhaps it would be best to talk about what you want – both of you, that is. And I am sure Astrid would very much like to return to her body. To make that possible, all I am asking is that she _show_ herself. Is that so much to ask?"

Slowly I allowed it. I thought, _I want her to see me_ and her eyes landed on me beside him. Her smile grew even wider. She moved forward but Five raised the rifle and aimed at her.

"You stay right there," he said.

"All right," she said. "I understand."

She was not wearing a monocle like my father had worn, but still I felt her scraping at me, eyes flashing in silver, seeking me out and searching for something that I could not quite name. Whatever it had been, she must have found it, because she smoothed down her skirt with an even brighter smile than before, seemingly reassured.

"You have no idea how long I have been looking forward to this," she said, tilting her head at me. " _Number Eight_."

**▬**


	5. during: five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, small alteration at the end to fit into the new idea i had for 'after' hehe i hope you all enjoyed rereading this or starting fresh if you haven't seen it. i thank you all for being with me in this story!

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

_during: five_

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Embers swept around the Handler but never caught onto the cold black creases of the coat tied neatly around her. She had called herself that between a thin puff of cigarette-smoke; _the Handler_ , something that made her so detached and impersonable, finished with a smile that softened her otherwise cold face. I called her cold because she had a thin line of white around her that was much frostier than the usual blue that came from the portals Five created. Hers was a brittle line that shivered and spun itself around her like the coiled tail of a snake, its head having vanished somewhere behind the gentle dip of her shoulders as she slouched forward on the stone that she used as a seat.

Five shuffled forward with the rifle still raised. "Tell me why I shouldn't put a bullet in your head."

"Because if you did," she answered, "you wouldn't hear the offer I'm about to make you, which would be rather tragic given your current circumstances. I work for an organisation called the Commission. We are tasked with the preservation of the time continuum through manipulations and removals."

All of what she said sounded rehearsed and dulled from repetition, her hands fiddling with the clasp of her cigarette-holder. It flashed silver and I thought distantly of a monocle, though I could not recall the reason for it and focused instead on that strange line of white around her. She had, whether intentionally or not, sat in a spot where the sunlight could not find her and it was purely that white light which warmed her, even if she was not warm herself. She was harsh shadows and knowing eyes.

"I don't understand," Five said.

"Sometimes people make choices that alter time," she replied. "Free will, don't get me started. When that happens, we dispatch one of our agents to…eliminate the threat."

The sound of his rifle cocking made something splinter in my chest and the stone beneath her turned cool red in colour, its watery edges seeping into the ground as if it had turned to liquid. I felt tired but Delores called out and warned me not to rest in front of the Handler. I followed the odd pattern of my own heartbeat which ran staccato in its rhythm and made me feel disjointed from them, though in my peripheral, I saw him lower the rifle and perhaps some vital moment had passed between them while I stood outside of it, splitting myself apart.

"We could actually leave here? G-Go back?"

"In return for five years of service. Once your contract is done, you can retire to the time and place of your choosing, with a pension plan to boot."

"If you can alter time, why not just stop all of this from ever happening?"

"That's quite impossible, I'm afraid. You see, all of this…it was _supposed_ to happen."

The colours around her softened and returned to their normal shades. I felt all the colour and light drain in me, too, hearing what she had said. It was not what we had anticipated from her, if we could even say that we had anticipated anything at all. It was probably because our father had spent so much time talking about _saving_ the world that allowing its destruction churned our stomachs. I imagined the pale faces of our siblings in rubble, scattered as close to each other that death would allow, dusted in powder, eyes blank but still searching for us.

"How could you want this?" I asked her. "For everything to just _end_?"

"All things must end," she said pleasantly, "for new things to begin."

There was a maddened sheen in Five's eyes, glistening bright against the sunlight. For quite some time, he had been quiet and withdrawn and tired, but I had not fully grasped his depression until she had said those words to him, drawing him from his shell. We had seen reddish-pink shells on a shoreline a long time ago and I thought it had been in this world but maybe it had been another and I wondered if he remembered, but he looked at me and I was sure that he was not thinking of shells but something that meant as much to him.

"What about Astrid?"

She snapped her cigarette-holder shut and tucked it neatly into the folds of her coat. "What about her?"

"She _needs_ her _body_ ," he stressed.

Her smile was moulded like Delores' had been, pleasant and detached, meant for nobody in particular. "Oh, that," she drawled. "Well, I had to pull a _lot_ of strings, but I believe we have found a compromise which suits us all. We would much prefer that Astrid remain in her astral form. However, if she signs her contract, she can be allotted holiday-time which can be spent within her body. Personally, I would prefer the Bahamas, but to each their own."

The rifle that Five had been holding tipped downward and bumped dumbly against the ground. "Would that make her – would she –…"

The shells clinked; the water swirled. I felt understanding lap against me like the shoreline had against the sand, teasing shells into sunlight, because he had wanted to say, _would that make her better? would she live?_

I loved him.

Without comparisons to moons and stars and all those other things we had read about in poems as children, I loved him. But he was holding onto his promise that he would take us home and it made him reconsider the possibility of returning to our world just because he distrusted the Handler. It was that distant smudged memory of home which sharpened itself as if I looked through the big machines at the optometrist's office as a little girl, squinting at yellow-bricked houses with slanted red roofs and narrow lines of green for their gardens. I had never needed glasses but our father had wanted our eyesight sharp and had us tested monthly. I could not remember now if our house had had yellow-bricked walls and a red roof.

But I loved him.

There had been yellow in the lettering of another building that I had seen and its neon-drenched sign floated up from a blurred puddle in my mind, promising doughnuts with melted sugar burnt on its rounded edges. I had shared some milkshakes with them and remembered the dollop of cream that clung to his nose but the rest of it was fuzzy and dripped from me if I tried hard enough to paint it in my brain. The letters, though – I clung onto them because I felt there was some significance to them and opened my eyes to find Five stood between me and the Handler.

"What do you think, Astrid?"

"I think we should take it," I told him. "After all, we promised to visit that doughnut place."

He looked at me like Diego had all those years beforehand, when he recognised that I was there, fully there with him and that I had remembered something important and that I had not left him yet, not like he feared. His throat bobbed and a hopeful smile twitched at the corner of his lips, momentarily dimpling his left cheek, but he sensed the Handler watching her from her stone perch as if we were two blurry little dots in a petri-dish and we slithered around beneath her microscope.

Like he wanted to shroud our words in a code that kept the Handler out, he croaked, "What was that place called again?"

"Griddy's," I answered.

Relief washed through him and softened the tension of his shoulders, the hard grit of his teeth and the cold glare that normally filled his eyes. This world had been tough on him but he smiled then and looked more like he had when he was younger – more like the boy dressed in uniform, knee-high socks and all, reassured and cocky.

Behind him, the Handler cleared her throat. "So, do we have an agreement?"

"Yes," I said, stepping around him to look at her. "We do."

"Wonderful. I will inform the Commission and return in one hour for you both. Perhaps you could take the time to collect your belongings." Though her eyes swept around our pitiful campfire and she added, "Or not."

The Handler appraised us coolly for a moment longer, with lips pressed together, then nodded and plucked her briefcase from the ground before vanishing in a slit of white light.

** ▬ **

There was nothing much to take but the book that Vanya had written and the other about the astronaut and finally the pocket-watch still coated in a light crust of mud from that time it had fallen. He slipped them all into his pocket before he looked at Delores. I felt what he did. We could not lug her around like we had for all these years and she watched us with sorrowful eyes, the plains of her face shrouded in the shadow of the stone arch above her.

"Say your goodbyes first, Astrid," he told me.

So, I sat in front of her and said my goodbyes but she told me that there was little need for them. She would wait like Five had waited for me in the same spot so that we would find her again if we ever needed her.

**▬**

He took a splint of stone from the dirt and turned it around in his hands, letting its jagged edge press against his palm. He carved into the stone of the arch beside Delores for distraction, having said his goodbyes, having told she would be missed and then he had sniffled suspiciously but denied all accusations of being sensitive like Luther had been.

I followed the pattern of his hand, fingertips stained with the chalk that came from stone rubbed in rounded shapes against more stone, its sound rough and displeasing. He had whittled our numbers into the stone: _five & eight_.

"If this goes to shit," he said. "It won't matter, because we'll come back and figure something else out. One of us can stay with Delores and the other will return to our family and tell them what fuck-ups they are and we'll fix the apocalypse. Not in that order, we can tell them they're fuck-ups after the apocalypse."

"Takes one to know one," I said. "Or two, in this case."

**▬**

Before the Handler reappeared, I noticed him slip something else into his pocket. I opened my mouth to ask him what it was but the white slit of light distracted me. The Handler stood a few feet away with her briefcase, toting a monstrously thin and tall man behind her.

His face was kind and open, his eyes hooded by his prominent brow. He held a towering pile of paperwork which flapped and ruffled in the wind. One sheet flew from him and he scrambled after it with his gangly limbs. I allowed him to see me and he flinched as if I had frightened him, forcing the Handler to roll her eyes and point at the paper which rolled away from him.

"Theodore," the Handler said, "if you lose even one piece of paper, you will lose an arm right along with it."

Theodore paled and the Handler smiled even more. She dropped a briefcase in front of Five and explained that it would bring him to the time and place of his choosing for all his assignments, but that Theodore would first bring him to a hotel where he could clean himself up a little.

At this, her nose crinkled and Five sniffed his own armpit, noting that Theodore took a subtle step away from him.

"Some would call it a musk," Five muttered to me.

"The musk of a corpse, maybe," I replied.

"Astrid should be capable of following you with the briefcase," the Handler interrupted. "But Theodore makes the briefcases and understands the finer details should any issues arise. Isn't that right, Theodore?"

He opened his mouth.

"Enough chit-chat, Theodore," she snapped.

He closed his mouth.

"I am sure both of you would like to get out of this dump," she continued briskly. "Sign wherever the tabs are and we can be finished with this whole business."

Though it was rubble and ash all around us, we had grown attached to our little fort and cart tucked into the corner of our camp and her calling it a _dump_ felt insulting; it was something that we could call it but not her and Theodore smiled sympathetically like he understood. Five took the fountain pen which Theodore offered him and signed with our numbers rather than a full signature, ignoring the watchful eye of the Handler who stood close, leaning forward to witness what he had written.

"All right," the Handler said. "Kick your heels together three times, Dorothy."

"I thought –…" Theodore started.

"Never mind," the Handler muttered. "Just _go_."

Five looked at me. "See you on the other side, Astrid."

He disappeared into a white slit of light. It was not like his other portals, which were rounder and blue. Thin and narrow, it looked more like the strip of light between curtains. I wondered if I could even fit through it, but it warped with my hand and spread outward. I took another quick glance at Delores and mouthed _thank you_.

I looked at his carvings on the stone and leapt through the white light to follow him.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Sunlight splintered between the buildings to warm Five in gold. He wore a suit which had been tailored to him, ironed around its collar like our mother had once done for us. His beard had been shaven, hair trimmed, hands loosened from tensed fists. He flinched at the honking of cars on the street around us, he avoided crowds. Theodore had followed us around all morning and was leading us to a hotel, passing through a park. He was such a tall figure that many on the street glanced at him, craning their necks.

A man stood from a bench and dropped his newspaper behind him. It fluttered in the breeze and I stood over it.

Its date was December 27th, 1991 and it read: _**THE DEATH OF THE SOVIET UNION**_.

** ▬ **

The handguns were similar to what we had used for training sessions as children. Theodore watched as Five took them apart and easily reassembled them, their gentle clicks like the beat of a song. Theodore wore a bland and polite smile as he watched Five.

"Guess you'll do fine with those," he said.

Five focused on the guns, never looking at Theodore. "Guess so."

** ▬ **

Once we were left alone, Five opened the mini-fridge in the room and took out the first bottle of wine that sat on a shelf in frosty blueness. He tipped it against his mouth and fell back onto the bed, staring blindly at the ceiling, its surface traced with little details like swirls and loops. Then, lazily, he shuffled to sit with me at the headboard. Neither of us spoke but listened instead to the dripping faucet and the distant chatter of other guests in the hall and the droning hum of the air-conditioner which rippled sheer curtains and bristled frayed strands of beige carpet.

It had been sometime in the afternoon when we had sat there, but only at midnight did we finally turn to look at each other. I noticed his cheeks were shiny and his eyes bloodshot. On the bed were another two small bottles of wine. I could not remember him taking them from the mini-fridge.

"None of this feels real," he said.

"The Soviet Union collapsed yesterday," I told him. "I saw the headlines about it. It must be real. But I feel it, too. It feels like nothing we do here has any impact."

"This apocalypse… Astrid, it can't happen. We can't _let_ it happen."

"We'll stop it," I told him. "We'll bide our time, wait for the right moment and return to our family."

He nodded, two dull bobs of his head and a drunken slump down against the sheets. "Break the contracts," he said. "And save the world. Easy-peasy."

I stared at the painting which had been embedded to the wall in front of us with a gaudy golden frame, ugly trimmings laced around it. The painting itself showed a small cluster of flowers in a vase, having already shed some pink petals which curled at its base like rotting shrimp. It meant nothing, this painting, but it was something to look at while my eyes welled with tears unshed, because I wished, again – again, again, _again_ , like I had wished for many nights in many decades – that we had never left our world for any other.

_careful with that stitch, astrid_

I flinched and looked right, peering into the bareness of the room, but there was nobody there. His eyelids drooped, the bottle was empty. I felt alone and hoped that Delores felt better.

"We made it this far," I said; more for myself than him, I had said it aloud. "We can hold out a little longer and find some way out of this."

"We used to watch buildings fall after years of decaying by themselves," he said, his voice laden with sleepiness. "Standing there for so long only for them to suddenly collapse one day, out of the blue."

"I know," I said.

"Just – don't go anywhere, Astrid," he said.

Confused, I looked down at him, wondering what he meant. "I'm not going anywhere, Five."

Something about that reassured him enough for him to fully sink against his pillows. I studied the painting and mulled through our options while he slept, picking apart everything that the Handler had said like our father might have done with poetry; looking for meaning in words which seemed meaningless, thrown in between long monologues, but there seemed to be nothing to latch onto.

Yet even if nothing else was clear, the understanding that our deaths mattered little if our family died with us in an apocalypse was the most clarity that I had had in a long time.

_astrid, darling, we have more embroidery to do later_

"I know," I said aloud. "I'll be there."

**▬**

The morning was cool and damp and Five looked as grey as the clouds, grumbling into his pillow with drool crusted at the corner of his mouth. I found it a little funny but he did not, snappy and sullen like a hungry bear. He was suffering from a thumping headache that made him roll from the bed and stumble for the shower. He returned freshly-shaven and dressed but the greyish colour on his cheeks remained.

"Anything wrong, Five?" I asked loudly.

"No," he mumbled. "I'm peachy."

"They'll charge for that wine, you know."

Five finally loosened up enough to snort and grin at me. "You know what, I'm thinking we get everything from the menu. I'll eat for the both of us."

** ▬ **

Not an hour afterward, there was a sharp rapping at the door and the Handler strolled in with her purse held between gloved hands, a strangely thick book tucked under her arm. Her eyes were darkened in familiar rings of liner that deepened her glare around the room, taking in the copious plates and bowls scattered around, the carts topped with desserts.

Plucking a strawberry from one frothing glass of champagne, she plopped it her mouth and swallowed, looking at Five.

"Famished, were you?"

He kicked his legs onto the bed, laced his fingers, and smiled back at her. "Oh, on the brink of death from starvation," he said.

"Glad you were spared," she replied tartly. "Well, perhaps it was better that you ate like a king. You'll need all your brain power for this."

She dropped the heavy book onto the bed, thicker than any Bible that I had ever seen, coated in a cartoonish cover and labelled THE COMMISSION HANDBOOK. I felt him look at me but I focused on the Handler. She had that white fuzziness around her, the light which followed her if she used her briefcase. I figured it was much better if she was unaware that I could see it.

"While you get a head-start on that, Five, Astrid will be visiting her body today," she continued, turning those dark eyes on me. Her smile was much tighter than it had been that day she found us in the wasteland. "Consider this as us… _getting to know each other_. Oh, Five, don't look jealous – you and I will have plenty of time to do the same. In fact, I plan on that happening rather soon."

"I'm looking forward to it," Five said, reaching for whipped cream lathered over a flourless cake.

"Until then," the Handler said.

** ▬ **

Sunlight filtered through the curtains and pooled along the pinewood flooring of the bedroom and my body turned gold just like Five had days beforehand on the street, before the alcohol had made him grey. The Handler stood beside me, looking down at my body with her lips pursed and her hands clasped together. I had the oddest sense that I stood at my own wake.

It was quiet in the house, too. It was more than quiet; it was lonely and scrubbed of dust. It needed dust. It needed something to fill its emptiness. In the bed, I was still a child. Outside of it, I was something else.

"Why are we here?" I asked.

The Handler pulled out a chair and sat on it with the same primness that she had had in our first meeting in the rot of our old world. "Tell me, Astrid, how does this whole thing work?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, perhaps I should rephrase it. How do _you_ work? I know you can manipulate astral energy."

It struck me again that she was very clever. I had known it through some instinct in my spine which sparked and sang at the sight of her, but this was perhaps the first clear time that I really looked at the sheen of intelligence behind her eyes, rocking around her skull, making her always aware and one step ahead like our father had been.

"I can use it to make things," I said very carefully. "Shields, spears of pure energy that could hurt someone. I can lift things with it if the object isn't too heavy. And I suppose you know that I can leave my body, obviously."

Her laugh echoed into the house, a placating laugh that meant nothing.

"Fascinating," she murmured. "And did you ever experiment with it?"

"Yes."

"All by yourself?"

I never wanted to hear her utter Pogo's name and so I skirted around it. "I had help."

"What a tragedy," she said. "Being locked out of your body as you are."

Her words pricked at me. She spoke like our father had always spoken, knowing answers before he asked his questions, layering his words in a light coating of doubt and then finishing it with the tilt of his chin downward against his chest so that his lids curtained his eyes, the same eyes which told us that he had always known what we would say, that no thought in our brain was ever original but rather something had had moulded and put there himself.

He would say something like _clouds are white and grass is green and you can manipulate energy._

Then he would tilt his chin and the lids would temper his knowing eyes and I would think, but _are clouds white? is grass green? can i manipulate energy?_

There was a bandage wrapped around my right wrist, motionless on the sheets of my bed.

"What is that?" I asked her.

"Just some insurance, Astrid," she replied. "It would allow us to feel more comfortable in returning you to your body as frequently as you will be doing throughout your contract."

"But what does it do to me?"

_and, for the record, you could never beat my ass, pipsqueak_

Again I looked around, my chest thumping with uncomfortable shudders but I walked the room in a slow circle, like it might distract her if I moved, if I wandered, and she might not know about it. I wanted her to know nothing about me or Five, nothing more than what she already did.

Slouched in her armchair, she had one elbow pressed into the arm of her chair and cradled her chin against the palm of her hand, watching me with hooded eyes.

"It does nothing," she said, "other than tell us where you are. Now, do you prefer to be called Astrid or Number Eight?"

"Number Eight," I said.

In this new place, I did not want Astrid and Number Eight to be the same anymore.

"Number Eight it is, then," she smiled.

_ is _ _it number eight?_

** ▬ **

Sitting in the narrow bathroom of our hotel room, he showed me the neat stitch on his wrist where they had stuffed a tracking-device beneath his skin and sewn it together again. It had been wrapped in a plaster and cling-film with no medication to soothe the pain of it.

"They put one in me too," I told him. "I saw it when I was with the Handler."

"Same place?"

"Yes."

The guests in the room beside ours were loud and rowdy that night. Their television crackled between the radio turned to its full volume and shouts of drunken laughter. I had heard others bang against their door and still nothing had settled them. The wall cushioned the worst of it but it seemed not to bother Five. He ran a fingertip along the bumpy stitches on his wrist and leaned back against the tiled wall.

"Good," he said. "Then I'll cut out mine and yours as soon as we're out of this contract."

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

There was something on the television sometime later, not in that hotel and not in another, but in a house, in a nice neighbourhood with American flags rippling in their yards. It showed on the small screen set into the bulky frame of the television itself and I sat on the sofa to watch it, because something about it mesmerised me; something about the rocket which rattled upward, shakily pushing itself from the ground in a fiery cloud. Maybe it was that cloud that had made me watch because it looked like how the dust-clouds had looked in the wasteland where we had spent an entire lifetime.

Crackling sound came through about speed and progress and I wished the little astronauts could talk to me, not their handlers, because they had handlers too, in their own way. The rocket flew sideways, it seemed, its fire bursting behind it in three big darts. I imagined the hand of a child clutching it and turning it this way and that, but it stayed on course and cut through clouds. It sped toward its own atmosphere and I could not look anywhere but at this tiny screen.

I thought something momentous was happening and it was passing me by somehow even though I sat there watching it.

Then its black tip burst and flew off, skirting down its silver-panelling until the whole rocket imploded and white clouds were all around it and those white clouds turned black and orange and clotted with debris. One little chunk of the rocket fell downward in a clean narrow swoop, shedding parts of itself that no longer served any purpose. In some foggy part of my mind, I understood that there was no-one inside the rocket, no astronauts and no great loss to the world but I mourned it like there had been, because I _felt_ that there had been.

**▬**

I remembered that night, too, because I had killed somebody for the Commission for the first time. I could not recall their name but whenever I thought about that house, in a nice neighbourhood, with American flags rippling in their yards, I remembered the same hollowness of watching a rocket splinter and burn as it thundered down from great heights.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

The tremor in my chest came and went, little flutters and the world would lose its colour no matter where or when I was. I would drift and drift and he would keep calling my name until he went hoarse and he would call my name some more. I felt groggy and tired.

"Hold on just a little bit longer, Astrid," he said.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

While sitting in another hotel – another hotel, another place, another time – I turned the pocket-watch in my palm, spun in astral energy. Its mud had flaked, but its glass was still dulled and scratched. I started to think about the lessons that I had had with Pogo. He had spent two years with me, practicing astral projection and making sure that I could return to my body using the pocket-watch. Dad had wanted more. He had wanted me to jump from my body whenever it was called for but Pogo had warned him that it was too risky because I would struggle to return to my body if I strayed too far.

It sparked a thought in my head. I _had_ gone far – through portals that acted like doorways. I wondered if that was it, if I had cracked something that should have been clear all along.

"Five," I said.

He was sleeping behind me and mumbled something incoherent. I called his name again. He sat up, glaring at me.

"Damn it, Astrid, I'm trying to sleep."

"Oh, you'll get your nap later, old man. I think I understand something and I need you to hear it. I've been hearing people talk to me – not like hearing voices. I hear things that our family already said to me. They happen randomly and I don't know why."

"You told me," he said. "A couple of days ago when it first started happening, you told me about it."

I paused. "Right," I mumbled uneasily. "Then what if these are all my projections overlapping with each other?"

He rubbed his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"Imagine you're standing on the other side of this hotel in another room. The rooms are all connected, one after the other in a long line, and the doors between my room and yours are all open. I could walk right through them and get to you on the other side," I said. "But to do it, I have to leave my body and astral project myself forward any time that I reach a new door. Every time that I walk through those doors, I leave an imprint of myself behind – because I'm moving further and further from my body, further from where I started. How much more can I leave behind?"

The flickering light of the television behind me warmed his face.

"Then, when I finally reach you in the room where you were standing the whole time, I can turn around see those other versions of me because I have to separate myself each time I step through a door. I keep leaving parts behind," I said. "I don't know if I'm right but I think those other versions don't just disappear. I see visions of what they saw and hear what they heard. But it's all _me_."

"Did you have to tell me this at three in the morning when my brain is at its slowest?"

"Right, like you'd be any quicker at noon," I said.

"Hey, Dad always told me that I was the smartest one," he replied. "Still true to this day."

I rolled my eyes at him. "Aren't you technically older than Dad now? You sure look it."

"Like _you're_ any younger."

"You're missing the point." I moved closer to him. "If I walk back through those doors to where I originally was, back to my body, maybe all this goes away. The memory loss, the confusion – maybe it's just putting all those versions of me back together."

"The goal was always getting you back to your body, Astrid," he said sleepily, fluffing his pillows before he lay against them. "Oh and stopping the apocalypse. And Dad said we weren't ambitious enough."

I snorted and shook my head. "Think about it, Five. Pogo had all these theories but he was afraid to tell me. Maybe this is one of the theories he had."

"Then he should have told you," Five grumbled. "Because maybe we wouldn't be in this mess if he had."

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Slipping back into my body, I looked through the peepholes of my own birdhouse and waited for somebody to come into the room who might sit with me like Diego had on Sunday afternoons. I would sit inside the cocoon of my own skull, looking around myself in the hopes that I had missed something – Pogo, perhaps, shuffling to the armchair that waited where it always had or my mother passing through the hall.

I looked for Diego most of all. I waited to hear him read to me and I ached for Nancy Sinatra to croon through the worn speakers of the old, battered radio in the room.

I practiced moving my hands and legs. I could twitch my left hand but not the right. I could scrunch my nose but not move my lips into a smile.

I waited and waited until I started to dread those times in my body and I felt more lonely than I had even in the apocalypse because Delores had been there and Five had her to distract him too but there was nothing to pull us out from this job. But nobody ever came into the room where I was and if they did, I was already gone before our paths could cross.

** ▬ **

When he asked me if anybody had been there when I was in my body and I told him that there hadn't been, he would try to suggest all the reasons that they would be gone – Allison was in Hollywood and Klaus was likely in prison and it would build up until I would say, _please, Five, let's talk about something else_.

But we were running out of things that could distract us. Even though we had rooms and books and each other, the job had turned into a heavy concrete ball and the contract was its chain.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Two tiny gimmick trophies popped up on the bedside table of our hotel room. The hotels blurred into one – the cities, the people, all blurred into one. The Handler was sitting on our bed with a bowl of mints on her lap.

"For the two best agents," she said, tilting her head at the trophies.

** ▬ **

Once she left, Five tipped the little trophies into the flimsy trashcan by the bathroom door.

** ▬ **

He drank the entire mini-bar and went downstairs for more liquor, stumbling into the room sometime in the night to collapse on the bed.

"I worry about you when you drink, Five."

He had not yet fallen asleep. He turned away from me and sighed. "Yeah, well, I worry about you all the time."

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

I felt like a little robot that travelled the world, noting all its great changes and continuing onward, chugging forward on dwindling fuel. He scratched down equations, he spoke the numbers aloud in whatever room we had taken. Sometimes we did not talk at all but instead I would read and count figures that he had written and correct him if he made a small error, though that was rare with him.

It felt like all we ever did was imagine our future someplace else.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

I was in my body again. It was perhaps the fourth time that I had taken over it again and I waited, alone, in that room, like I always did. I heard something downstairs, like glass shattering. I heard voices and my heart flit madly in my chest. I wanted to speak, to call out, to say _I'm here, please, I'm right here_.

I scrunched my hand – both hands, now, into tight fists and my left foot rose momentarily from the bed. It fell again and I screamed within my own mind. I smacked my fists into the sheets. It was the most that I had ever done and I thought that if I kept going, I could rise from the bed.

I was so close, so close.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

There was a calendar in the office of the man that we had just killed; one spike of astral energy through his chest and that was the end of it. It meant that there were never any weapons to be found and we took turns in who would chase and track the target down but always we did the final act together, pushing each other forward. The little calendar was beside the folders on the desk and it was small and yellowed and had some dates circled.

It read SEPTEMBER 1983.

** ▬ **

One night, he said, "I think I have it. I think I know the formula to get us back, Astrid."

I had not scrambled from the bed to look at his newest equation and I listened to him recite it like a prayer. I listened and listened and slowly started to wonder if he really had found it but forced myself to remain blank and calm like Number Eight should be, because he had tried equations before. He had suffered nosebleeds and he had passed out from them.

"Next job," he said. "On the next job, we try it."

** ▬ **

It came one week later in the rumbling sound which ended with a _pop_ in our minifridge. He pulled out the pneumatic tube, unrolled its paper.

"Assassinate John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963, at 12.30pm," he murmured. "This is the one, Astrid. This is how we get out of our contracts."

** ▬ **

On November 22nd, 1963, at ten in the morning, the Handler sent another pneumatic tube which asked me to meet her in the restaurant of the hotel, which was five-stars and luxurious and had been booked out for those who came from all over to watch the President in his motorcade.

Outside our window was nothing but flags, confetti, cheers and celebrations and we were on the third floor, overlooking a street parade that was preparing for the real event. We had memorised the path of the motorcade, we had planned our spots, we had done it all like we normally had and that was what panicked us.

Five had unfolded the note and read it aloud with dull wonder in his tone. He sat on the bed and we watched the scrunched-up letter on the desk where he left it, its dreaded edges unfolding, teasing us. She asked that I attend this strange meeting in the next half-hour and the clock was ticking toward it but I found myself too numb to do anything.

"She found out," I said. "She wants to separate us. Easier for the agents she'll send after us."

"No," he said absently. "No, it can't be that. How could she know that we were planning anything if we haven't done nothing differently?"

"What else could she want, Five?"

"We'll still make it out today," he said. "She wants you to meet her, so you'll meet her. You finish with her and then you meet me just before twelve-thirty. I'll set up my rifle and wait for Kennedy, make it as real as possible in case any other agents _do_ show up."

"It doesn't have to be today."

"It does," he said.

I tried to appease him, to show him that it could be put back. "Well, I think I understand what's happening to me, anyway. I think I'm hearing and seeing other versions –…"

"We talked about this, Astrid," he interrupted. "You can't go on like this. Remember when we talked about it?"

"Yes," I lied.

"No, you don't." He looked at me and smiled, though it was full of sadness and something worse than that; something more like resignation, which was something that I had never seen on him before. "That's why it _has_ to be today. You can't forget this time."

"Did we try this before? Did I forget?"

He was quiet. Then, he said, "You have to be there at the right time, Astrid."

"I know," I said aloud. "I'll be there."

**▬**

The lobby was bustling with people dressed in their finest church clothes; women had pinned their hats and men wore tailored suits like Five did now, smoothing down their hair and straightening ties. I remembered Diego had done that for my hair and my ties and I felt a rush of pain for how much I missed him. But I would see him soon. I phased through the lobby and into the restaurant, catching sight of the Handler immediately for the gaudy pale-pink hat that sat atop her white, curled hair. It was tipped sideways and had some kind of mesh wrapped around it.

Behind the bar to my left, I saw a clock, ticking and ticking.

_well then, astrid, did you bring your old pocket-watch?_

I shivered and kept walking forward, ignoring the scratch at the back of my throat, the knot in my brain and the odd numbness in my hands. I had to remind myself of the time that I was meant to meet Five.

"Number Eight!" the Handler called. "You- _hoo_! Over here!"

For the other guests in the restaurant, she was calling out to a blank eggshell wall. But the other guests had white lines around them; not all of them, but a handful scattered around the room, their suits replaced with light dresses or plain suits, nothing like the dull blue that agents normally wore. I wondered why she had bothered to bring them if nobody could see me until I allowed them to see me.

But they knew that I was there. She had announced it to them.

If I turned around, they would have caught Five leaving through the lobby and at least he might get a head-start. So, I phased through tables and clinking cutlery to sit with her. She was scooping sticky red jam onto a golden sliver of toast and it clung to her fingertips. She wiped her hands with a napkin and then took a bite from her toast, moaning loudly. I was grateful that nobody could see me in this room but her.

"You asked to see me," I said.

"I did." She grinned and little seeds of strawberry-jam peeped from between her front teeth. "I had such a wonderful idea yesterday that I simply _had_ to see you."

I watched her hands while she poured herself from tea. "What is it?" I asked, because she had waited long enough, like she wanted me to prod her for it, to _work_ for it.

She snapped her fingers and the chair between us, which until then had been empty and unnoticed, scraped against the carpet, filled by another agent whose small frame was outlined in white like all the others. She had a paleness to her that made her seem translucent, though her cheeks were awash with freckles. Her hair was a dull natural red and curled at the ends in dead, rotting strands. Somehow, it seemed that she was more unaware of me than I would normally be of anybody else around me.

"This," the Handler said, "is Pruitt. Would you allow her to see you, Number Eight?"

Though I showed myself to Pruitt, her eyes remained on her plate. Then, still without saying anything, she reached for a cup that sat beside it and took the teapot from the Handler, pouring a golden-brown mixture into it. She filled it with eight sugar-cubes and slopped milk into it right after, letting it pool in white streaks rather than stir it.

"I think it would be better if I stayed working with Five," I said.

The Handler had that gleam in her eye like she was ahead of me – miles ahead of me, looking behind to see my silhouette was fading into the horizon because I could not run fast enough to catch her.

"Nonsense. All it takes is getting to know each other. Pruitt is doing some wonderful work. As wonderful as you and Five. The folks at the Commission are so intrigued to see how you might work as a pair. Perhaps Pruitt can also work with Five for a short time. Two, three jobs at most."

Pruitt made a small sound like a cough. She took another sugar-cube and placed it on her tongue this time, holding her mouth open for us to watch it pool and drain down her throat.

_you have to be there at the right time, astrid_

I saw the clock had turned close to twelve and started to flit through options. I was still not sure why other agents were around us – the Handler would not know that I could tell who they were based on the white line that followed them from travelling through time, but then those agents were useless because they could know where I was in the room, yet not be able to follow me if I ran because none of them could see me. The only two people in the room who could see me were the Handler and this strange girl named Pruitt.

But I would have to accept it if it meant leaving the hotel and finding Five in time to make the jump back. All the work that we had put into it, all the years focused on this moment, would be wasted otherwise.

"Two or three jobs," I repeated.

"Minimum," the Handler nodded.

Another agent stood from the table behind her and approached us. I focused only on the Handler and feigned surprise when he bent down to whisper in her ear. Pruitt took another sugar-cube and turned it on her palm like I had often turned the prosthetic eyeball. She ate it quickly and I wondered how she had come to be here, in this hotel in Dallas.

The Handler cleared her throat. "Would you excuse me for a moment, Number Eight?"

She had not asked Pruitt if she minded. I said, "Go ahead."

It was perhaps the only shot that I would have to leave because the Handler walked through a pair of brown doors, into another hallway. I counted the other agents and noted that four remained. It all seemed so strange but I could hardly spend too much time thinking about it given that the clock was ticking forward – _tick-tick-tick_ like I could hear it from where I sat with Pruitt.

"I forgot something in my room," I said to her.

I stood from my chair and she did the same.

"You don't have to come with me," I smiled. "It's just upstairs."

She nodded and my shoulders slumped with relief. But then, when I walked around the table to the lobby, she followed behind me. She had no expression, no sign that she had been ordered to walk with me, but the other agents rose from their seats, folding their napkins, smoothing down their ties, pretending to wander ahead of us into the lobby.

"Pruitt," I said carefully, "you can wait here for the Handler."

She had been ordered to follow me, I was sure of it. The other agents could not see _me_ , but they could see _her_. I tried to think of what the reason could be for it – if I wanted, I could become invisible to her again and run for it. Yet the entire thing seemed pointless because I doubted anybody could kill me in this form. Maybe an agent stood over my body in the house with their handgun aimed at my temple and the Handler had been interrupted because she could threaten me.

The brown doors through which the Handler had disappeared shifted open.

I glimpsed a pink hat and made the decision in that brief second to run for it. I forced Pruitt not to see me, forced the Handler too, and bolted into the lobby. The agents were strewn around, leafing through the newspapers on the front desk and chatting to one another about Kennedy like they had rolled into town just for him.

I looked behind me only once and saw Pruitt standing in the lobby, dull and lifeless and not at all alerting anybody that I had vanished and left her behind.

**▬**

There was a bell-tower on one of the streets blocked off for the motorcade. Below it, a large clock counted down to twelve-thirty while I was still three blocks from Number Five. I ran and ran, through crowds of excited people, through the confetti which rolled through me like I was smoke and wind, darting for the parking lot that we had chosen.

Even with his rifle propped on the white-picket fence in front of him and the book that Vanya had written in his hands, he was waiting for me, looking around in the dead heat and wiping his brow. I called for him from across the parking lot, running fast.

I yelled out, "Five, open the portal!"

Blue light burst from his fists, sparking and crackling and then fading before the colour would bloom again, but the portal that showed was not quite circular; it spun in a rectangle that then smoothed around its edges and I understood that he really had figured it out, that we could peer through it to the other side even though it looked murky and dense.

"Go through, Astrid," he told me. “I’m right behind. I’m always right behind you –…”

He tipped us forward, like we passed through a doorway, his chest against my back. I _felt_ his touch for one tremor, like the hands of a clock pushed forward – somewhere between where it had been and where it would be, I felt him there. I reached for him with my hand, this foreign hand which flickered into something corporeal, reached out to hold onto him and bring him with me. He would ground me, because I was spinning like the parts of a rocket that had once been whole, fluttering down from the atmosphere like little grains of ash blown in wind.

**▬**

His hand grasped mine at the fingertips and then slipped away into the portal, thundering away in tones of blue. It was him who faded now, warped into shadows, swept away from me.

**▬**

On the other side, there was the scent of fresh linen but there could be no colour without him.

**▬**


End file.
